ONLY A FEW days after my father began his second term, General Vaughan asked him: “Are you going to run for reelection in 1952?”

Dad looked up at him in complete astonishment. “Have you lost your mind?” he asked.

The next twelve months did not change his thinking. On April 16, 1950, he wrote himself one of his most important memoranda:

I am not a candidate for nomination by the Democratic Convention.

My first election to public office took place in November 1922. I served two years in the armed forces in World War I, ten years in the Senate, two months and twenty days as Vice President and President of the Senate. I have been in public office well over thirty years, having been President of the United States almost two complete terms.

Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, Andrew Jackson, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as Calvin Coolidge, stood by the precedent of two terms. Only Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and FDR made the attempt to break that precedent. FDR succeeded.

In my opinion, eight years as President is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in that capacity.

There is a lure in power. It can get into a man’s blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do.

This is a republic. The greatest in the history of the world. I want this country to continue as a republic. Cincinnatus and Washington pointed the way. When Rome forgot Cincinnatus, its downfall began. When we forget the examples of such men as Washington, Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson, all of whom could have had a continuation in the office, then will we start down the road to dictatorship and ruin. I know I could be elected again and continue to break the old precedent as it was broken by FDR. It should not be done. That precedent should continue not by a constitutional amendment, but by custom based on the honor of the man in the office.

Therefore, to re-establish that custom, although by a quibble I could say I’ve only had one term, I am not a candidate and will not accept the nomination for another term.

On November 19, 1951, while Dad was vacationing at Key West, he took this memorandum out and read it to his staff. He wanted to let them know his decision, he said, so they would have plenty of time to plan ahead on their careers. However, he made it clear he had no intention of making the announcement public for some time. It was a tremendous tribute to the loyalty Dad’s staff felt for him that the secret, one of the hottest in the history of the presidency, was kept for almost six months. Bill Hassett said it was “one of the most amazing things I recall from all my years in Washington.”

That night at Key West, the conversation immediately turned to the problem of selecting a Democratic nominee for 1952. Just before Dad made his announcement, Adlai Stevenson’s name had come up in the conversation. Dad proceeded to express himself very bluntly on him as a candidate. He said he hoped the Democratic Party “would be smart enough to select someone who could win. And by that I don’t mean the Stevenson type of candidate. I don’t believe the people of the United States are ready for an Ivy Leaguer.”

The talk then veered to the man who my father had always hoped would succeed him - Chief Justice Fred Vinson. But Dad had recently had a long talk with “Papa Vin” and had been unable to persuade him to run. He had two good reasons. He hesitated to embroil the Supreme Court in politics, and neither he nor his wife felt his health was strong enough to enable him to sustain a grueling presidential campaign.

Beyond Chief Justice Vinson, my father and his aides faced the rather grim fact there weren’t very many prospective Democratic candidates. Alben Barkley wanted to be President, but he was too old. Estes Kefauver, the junior senator from Tennessee, had a virulent case of White House fever, but Dad considered him a lightweight. He had also alienated most of the big city Democratic leaders with his traveling television circus in 1950, which seemed to specialize in exposing crime and corruption in cities where Democrats were in the majority. Averell Harriman was capable of doing the job, and he wanted it, but he had never campaigned for political office. He could muster only nominal support from Democrats in his home state of New York.

Then, on January 6, 1952, came a shock from abroad. General of the Armies Dwight Eisenhower announced from his NATO headquarters he was ready to accept a call to “duty” higher than his present responsibilities.

My father had sensed for some time Ike was thinking of running for office. When he made one of his periodic visits to Washington early in November 1951, to report on NATO, he had aroused intense political discussion. Ike commented wryly on the hubbub as another “great debate,” and Dad replied, “I’m not interested in that. You can see anybody you want to and do anything you want to while you are here.”

This remark should not be interpreted as endorsing Ike for President. At no time did my father ever look favorably on this idea. One version of the story that Dad offered to endorse Ike has him doing it in 1945, in Germany. Neither Dad nor anyone who was with him at that time recalls such a statement. However, General Harry Vaughan does remember a 1946 luncheon at the Pentagon at which Ike entertained Dad, Charlie Ross, Clark Clifford, himself, and a few other aides. There was a good deal of lighthearted banter around the table about army politics and civilian politics. In the course of it, Dad jokingly said to Ike: “General, if you ever decide you want to get into politics, you come to me and I’ll sure endorse you.”

No one took it very seriously. Certainly my father did not take it seriously. In fact, he came to regard references to Ike as a savior figure with considerable amusement. One day in August 1950, the White House received a telegram which read: “May I urge you to suggest to President Truman that he name General Dwight Eisenhower as assistant commander in chief of our armed forces.” Harry Vaughan put it on Dad’s desk, and Dad scribbled on it, “In a terrible quandary over this!”

Even if my father had known Ike was planning to become a candidate, he would still have chosen him for supreme commander in Europe. He was the right man for the job. Also, Ike was humble to the point of obsequiousness in admitting how strongly he approved of Dad’s foreign policy. In the November 1951, meeting at the White House, he told Dad and ten or twelve other members of the Cabinet and staff that when he went to Europe in February 1951, he thought the idea of a European defense force was “as cockeyed an idea as a dope fiend could have figured out. I went over completely hostile to it,” he said. “But now,” he went on, “I’ve shifted.”

Even before that remark, Ike had made a habit of flattering my father. After the 1948 election, he wrote a letter which was almost too thick for Dad’s taste. “You don’t have to reaffirm your loyalty to me,” Dad wrote back. “I always know exactly where you stand.”

In July 1949, Ike wrote another letter, in which he commented on some stamps which the Post Office was designing for him. He remarked that Dad no doubt would be around to make the final decision on them. Dad replied: “I certainly do appreciate your belief that I’ll be able to decide on the postage stamps for 1954. As you know, that is two years beyond the end of this term, and, of course, I haven’t made up my mind yet whether to quit or go ahead and be sure these stamps are gotten out for you. I rather think this is going a little bit far in the future though, and, in all probability, it would be better to take the matter up with the then Postmaster General a few months before the 1954 budget goes into effect.”

Even after the General all but announced his candidacy in January, my father still felt Ike was on his side in the area that mattered most, foreign policy. On January 31, 1952, he wrote the following letter to him:

Dear Ike:

I certainly appreciated your good letter of the twenty-third. You can rest assured that no matter what the professional liars and the pathological columnists may have to say, you and I understand each other.

I certainly hope that Lisbon meeting [of NATO] will turn out all right. . . . I think we are approaching a condition in world affairs where we can become powerful enough to ward off a third world war, if we continue the Foreign Policy which we have been pursuing. I think you understand it as thoroughly and completely as I do.

I hope everything is going well with you and that it will continue to go just that way. Please remember me to Mrs. Eisenhower.

As long as Senator Robert Taft had seemed to be the probable Republican candidate, my father thought any Democrat with a decent record could win. The emergence of Ike made Dad feel urgent about finding a Democratic candidate, early in 1952. The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced - somewhat reluctantly - that Adlai Stevenson of Illinois was the man. One of the White House aides, Dave Lloyd, had worked with Stevenson in the State Department and was constantly singing his praises. My father finally told Charlie Murphy to call Governor Stevenson and ask him to come to Washington for a talk.

Charlie and Dave Lloyd met Stevenson at George Ball’s office, late in the afternoon of the day he arrived in Washington. They told him why the President wanted to see him, and Stevenson voiced great reluctance about running. Charlie Murphy went directly to the White House and told Dad what Governor Stevenson had said. A President never likes to be confronted by the unexpected, if he can avoid it.

About eight o’clock that night, Governor Stevenson came to Blair House and talked with my father for over an hour. In a memorandum he made later about their conversation, Dad wrote: “I told him what I thought the Presidency is, how it has grown into the most powerful and the greatest office in the history of the world. I asked him to take it and I told him if he would agree he could be nominated. I told him that a President in the White House always controlled the National Convention.”

Stevenson talked all around the subject in his charming, intellectual way. By the time they parted, he had created total confusion, not only in his own mind, but in Dad’s mind. The next morning, when Charlie Murphy asked my father what Governor Stevenson’s answer had been, Dad replied: “Well, he was a little reluctant, but he finally said yes.” Only a few days later Murphy was astonished to learn Stevenson was telling all his friends, including at least one prominent Washington newspaperman, that he had said no.

“This,” Charlie Murphy says with masterful understatement, “was not a situation that you could live with.” He arranged to meet Governor Stevenson for dinner at George Ball’s house. They argued with Stevenson all evening but could not persuade him to say yes. “We left without any answer,” Charlie says, “but at least we had gotten to the point that he understood now he hadn’t said no.”

Some weeks later, Governor Stevenson wrote Murphy a very long letter, explaining why he did not feel he could be the candidate. The sad truth is Stevenson was rather favorably inclined toward General Eisenhower and, like many liberals, even felt that perhaps it was time for a change of parties. My father, with his far greater knowledge of national politics, feared with good reason that the General would be totally unable to cope with the reactionaries in the Republican Party and would become the captive of Senator Taft and his friends.

Another reason for Stevenson’s reluctance became apparent later in the year. He did not want to be Harry S. Truman’s hand-picked candidate. Stevenson had apparently been disheartened by an outbreak of corruption on the lower levels of Dad’s administration. He seemed to feel the President had been tainted with the weakness displayed by Internal Revenue collectors and a few wheeler-dealers in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He was unimpressed by the fact that many of the Internal Revenue collectors had been caught and fired before the Republicans in Congress ever began screaming about them, or by the complete overhaul of the RFC my father ordered as soon as signs of corruption were detected there. An assistant attorney general, T. LaMar Caudle, who was more naïve than corrupt, was fired the moment his dubious dealings with tax-fixers came to light. When Howard McGrath, the Attorney General, attempted to defend Caudle, he too was fired. No sensible person can expect a President to do more than act swiftly and forthrightly when he finds this kind of unpleasantness in his administration.

To my father, who had passed through the corruption of the Pendergast machine without a single taint of it adhering to him personally, Governor Stevenson’s attitude was simply incredible. Fortunately, at this time he was not aware Stevenson held this opinion. Early in March, when the governor was in Washington again, he came to the White House and told my father he had decided not to run because he was committed to a second term in the Illinois State House. “He did not think he could go back on that commitment honorably,” Dad said.

By playing reluctant hero and attempting to maneuver the party into drafting him, Stevenson forfeited a crucial dimension of his candidacy. My father had planned to throw behind him all the resources of the Democratic Party and the presidency, to build him into a national figure well before the election.

Meanwhile, Dad was left without a candidate. For a few weeks, he reconsidered his decision not to run again. First, he had a small dinner at Blair House, with only a few of his closest advisers, such as Fred Vinson and Charlie Murphy. Later, he convened a larger meeting, which included the whole White House staff, as well as several congressional leaders. At this meeting, he polled the entire room - a dozen or more - and asked each man what he thought. Although they gave varying reasons, not one of them thought he should run again.

Mother felt the same way. So did I. Mother’s opinion carried a lot more weight than mine, of course. Dad decided the verdict seemed to be unanimous.

On March 29, 1952, my father was the chief speaker at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in the Washington Armory. It was one of the biggest dinners in the history of the Democratic Party - 5,300 people contributed $100 each, to raise over half a million dollars for the Democratic National Committee treasury. Dad gave one of his best speeches. He ridiculed the “dinosaur school of Republican strategy” which wanted to go back to “prehistoric times.” Entwined in this sarcasm was a serious plea for a bipartisan foreign policy:

Some Republicans seem to think it would be popular to pull out of Korea, and to abandon Europe, and to let the United Nations go smash. They read it this way: “The American people aren’t very bright. Let’s tell them they don’t have to build up defenses, serve in the army, or strengthen our allies overseas. If they fall for that, then we Republicans will be in - and that’s all that matters.”

Dad warned the Democrats the Republican campaign would not be fought on the issues. They were going to wage a campaign of “phony propaganda” with Senator McCarthy as their real spokesman. “They are going to try what we might call the ‘white is black’ and the ‘black is white’ strategy.” Another branch of this strategy, Dad said, was their smear that the government was full of grafters and thieves and all kinds of assorted crooks: “Now I want to say something very important to you about this issue of morality in government. I stand for honest government. I have worked for it. I have probably done more for it than any other President. I have done more than any other President to reorganize the government on an efficient basis, and to extend the Civil Service merit system. I hate corruption not only because it is bad in itself, but also because it is the deadly enemy of all the things the Democratic Party has been doing all these years. I hate corruption everywhere, but I hate it most of all in a Democratic officeholder, because that is a betrayal of all that the Democratic Party stands for.”

My father then summed up the Democratic Party’s record of service to the farmer, the worker, and world peace. Finally came the fateful words: “Whoever the Democrats nominate for President this year, he will have this record to run upon. I shall not be a candidate for reelection. I have served my country long, and I think efficiently and honestly. I shall not accept a renomination. I do not feel that it is my duty to spend another four years in the White House.”

Everyone not in on the secret was utterly astonished. There were cries of “no, no” from the audience. Photographers rushed from one end of the head table, where Dad was speaking, to the other end, where Adlai Stevenson was sitting. Even then, in spite of his non-candidacy, he was the front runner.

Meanwhile, my father continued to run the government of the United States. In the months immediately following his announcement, he made two of his most controversial decisions.

Late in March, it became clear to the President and the rest of the country that a steel strike was threatening to cripple our economy in the middle of a war. The Wage Stabilization Board had recommended giving the Steelworkers Union a boost of 26.4 cents an hour. The companies had arrogantly refused to bargain with the union, and they now insisted, with even more arrogance, that they would not grant the increase unless they were permitted to add $12 a ton to the price of steel. My father considered this nothing less than profiteering and refused to go along, even when his Director of Defense Mobilization, Charles E. Wilson, resigned over his stand. On April 7, the unions announced they were going out on strike. The lives of our men in Korea were threatened, and our NATO buildup in Europe would be fatally undermined by a long strike. Dad acted promptly out of his conviction the nation was faced with an immense emergency. He issued Executive Order 10340 to seize the steel mills.

The following day, he asked Congress for legislation which would give him the power he needed to operate the mills. Congress refused to act, and the steel companies took the government to court. Federal Judge David Pines ruled that Order 10340 was unconstitutional. Although the judge received a lot of publicity for supposedly defying the President, the man he really slapped down was the government attorney who handled the case. He was lamentably inept. “Our position is that there is no power in the courts to restrain the President,” he declared. This was practically an open invitation for the judiciary to assert its power as the third - and coequal - branch of the government.

Within another week, the Supreme Court announced it would hear the case. On June 2, 1952, the Court ruled, six to three, that the President had exceeded his constitutional powers. It was one of the strangest decisions in the Court’s history. Each of the majority judges wrote separate opinions, since they could not agree on any fundamental reason why the seizure of the mills was unconstitutional. The arguments of the government’s witnesses, Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett, Secretary of Interior Oscar Chapman, and others, that a national emergency existed, were ignored. Chief Justice Vinson dissented vigorously from the majority, and expressed grave dissatisfaction with “the complete disregard of the uncontroverted fact showing the gravity of the emergency and the temporary nature” of the seizure.

The most painful part of this episode was the attacks made on my father by some members of the press, and by the public relations men of the steel companies. He was accused of plotting to seize the nation’s newspapers and radio stations, and set up a dictatorship. The steel companies filled newspapers and magazines with ads picturing the battle as the test of whether our free enterprise system will survive. For someone who had spent much of his time in public office attempting to prevent the greedy members of the business community from destroying free enterprise, this was hard to take. Even more galling was the talk of dictatorship to a man who revered the office of the presidency and the Constitution of the United States as deeply as Dad has revered them, from boyhood.

My father’s second decision concerned the disposition of the offshore oil resources of the nation. Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada had introduced a resolution which attempted to convey to three states the rights to $100 billion worth of oil. Even before the bill reached Dad’s desk, he announced, “I intend to stand up and fight to protect the people’s interest in this matter.” On May 29, 1952, he vetoed the bill. In his message he pointed out that during his first months as President, he had issued an Executive Order claiming federal jurisdiction over all the mineral resources of the continental shelf, which extends 150 miles or more off the coast of our country.

Even the traditional three-mile limit could not be claimed by the states, Dad noted, because the rights to these lands were obtained by the federal government through a letter which Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson had written in 1793. Scathingly, Dad condemned this “free gift of immensely valuable resources which belong to the entire nation, to the states which happen to be located nearest to them.” The political repercussions, in Texas particularly, were grim. Many leading Democrats openly bolted the party. But my father never wavered from his conviction he had acted rightly on behalf of all the people by refusing to kowtow to a minority of oil barons.

By now, the political campaign was really heating up. General Eisenhower asked permission to resign from NATO and become a candidate. My father brought him home immediately. I will not be so naïve as to claim Harry S. Truman, the quintessential Democrat, did not begin to regard Ike with a slightly jaundiced eye, from the moment he announced he was a Republican. Nevertheless, I think a conversation, on which Dad made notes several weeks after Ike had come to the White House to give the President his last report on NATO, is worthy of some historical interest.

They got into a discussion of Point Four, and Ike made it clear he thought little of the program. What did he think was the answer to the world’s economic problems? Dad asked.

“Birth control,” Ike said.

“Do me a favor,” Dad said.

“I’ll be glad to, if I can,” Ike said.

“Go make a speech on birth control in Boston, Brooklyn, Detroit and Chicago.”

These were, of course, strongholds of the Catholic Church, and in 1952, any politician who made such a speech in any one of these places would be committing instant suicide.

Ike did not get the point at all. “He is not as intelligent as I thought,” Dad wrote. “Evidently his staff has furnished the intelligence.”

As they parted, Ike expressed considerable resentment over some rather nasty comments which certain segments of the press had already begun making about his candidacy. The General had thought he was going to get the Republican nomination on a platter. But Senator Taft had other ideas, and Ike found himself in the middle of a dogfight for delegates. Senator Taft had plenty of newspaper support, and Ike suddenly had become the target of numerous uncomplimentary remarks. Dad grinned. “Ike,” he said, “I suggest you go right down to the office of the Republican National Committee and ask them to equip you with an elephant hide about an inch thick. You’re going to need it.”

Meanwhile, the President’s wandering daughter took off again. With my best friend Drucie Snyder Horton for company, I headed for Europe aboard the S.S. United States on her maiden voyage. My trip during the previous summer was “official” - which meant I had to stay at embassies and consulates. This time, I insisted on making it as unofficial as a President’s daughter can manage it. I still had Secret Service men on my trail, and there would, I knew, be receptions and welcomes wherever we went. But otherwise we would be relatively free agents.

Dad was just a little worried about having us on the loose in Europe. We tend to get a little giddy when we are together, and we were adept at being silly. To make sure everything went well, I was ordered to report to the State Department to pick up my passport from no less than Dean Acheson. He had obviously been told to give me a little lecture on how to behave, lest the dignity of the United States be impaired. “Now remember, don’t upset any apple carts,” he said, pointing those formidable eyebrows at me.

In the same spirit, I told him I would behave myself according to my understanding of the word. “If that’s not good enough for you, that’s too bad,” I said.

This did not exactly reassure the Secretary of State. Our session down at Foggy Bottom that day explains the touch of acid humor in our relationship which persisted until his death.

While I was in London, I got an amusing letter from Mother. She was very put out by a silly newspaper story that her grandfather’s relatives were waiting to greet me in Ireland. The story claimed Grandfather Wallace had been born there.

The White House,

July 4, 1952

(It seems like Sunday

with Dad at home)

Dear Marg -

Fred Vinson and Dad and I are going to the baseball game this afternoon. Double header! I haven’t seen one in years. “Mama” Vinson said she wouldn’t sit on a hard seat that long.

The thing about your grandfather Wallace being born in Ireland is popping up again and I want it settled, once and for all. You will probably have an excellent opportunity to do it in Dublin at a press conference. His name was David Willock Wallace and he was born in Independence, Mo. His father was Benjamin Franklin Wallace and he was born in Green County, Ky. There has never been a “Robert” (as quoted in the papers) in the entire family history. The current story is that I am the daughter of “Robert” and that he still lives somewhere in Ireland. I’m sick and tired of it. . . .

Mother

Mother wrote this letter from the White House. We had finally moved back into the Great White Jail in the spring of 1952. Dad was in the middle of coping with the steel strike and had very little time to enjoy the round of parties and receptions which began immediately after we moved in. As a housekeeper, Mother thoroughly enjoyed her new surroundings. The place was painted and papered and decorated down to the most minute details. Personally, I found it more hotel-like than ever.

The first part of the European trip was a delight. We had lunch with Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh in Buckingham Palace, toured Ireland and Scotland, oohed at a Dior showing in Paris, aahed up the Grindelwald in Switzerland, heard The Marriage of Figaro in Salzburg, and penetrated the Iron Curtain to tour Berlin. I wanted to see Potsdam, but I was sadly informed it was out of the question. It was in Communist territory, and the cold war was very frigid at that point.

We left Berlin at night on the so-called HiCog (for High Commissioner of Germany) train. I noticed our official escort, Sam Rieber, the deputy high commissioner for Germany, was very nervous. He was smoking cigarettes by the pack. At 2:00 a.m., Drucie and I were still sitting up, talking, when the train came to a grinding halt. Suddenly it was surrounded by Russian soldiers. Sam Rieber turned pale. He later admitted he worried a year off his life that night. But the Russians turned out to have no interest in anything as spectacular as kidnapping the President’s daughter. They were just playing their old game of harassment on the Berlin railroad. Unwittingly, they did us a favor. They had stopped the train in the suburbs of Potsdam, and from our windows we could see the moonlit walls and roof of the Cecilienhof Palace where my father had met with Marshal Stalin and Churchill.

Everything about our trip was idyllic until we arrived in Sweden. There I discovered that all the angry things Dad said about the hostile American press were mere understatements compared to the fabrications which the Swedish press began to concoct. First, there was a rumor I was in love with Governor Adlai Stevenson. I denied this emphatically. Next the Swedish reporters went from imaginary gossip to fabrication of a nonexistent incident. I returned from a tour of City Hall to discover three of the most important papers in Stockholm were carrying a vivid tale of how my Secret Service agents had “roughed up” newsmen and photographers who wanted to take a picture of me. The story was replete with sneering remarks, such as “Miss Truman is in no danger of her life here - if she does not plan to sing!”

All this was intensely irritating, but what really infuriated me was the reaction of our ambassador, W. Walton Butterworth, and his fellow diplomats in the American Embassy. Instead of categorically denying the story, they proceeded to attempt to back up the Swedish accusation and practically draw up an indictment of my Secret Service men.

I waited ten days to write a letter to Dad, hoping I would calm down a little. But the one I wrote was still a scorcher. I told him how Butterworth began apologizing to the Swedish Foreign Office and anyone else who would listen, without even bothering to ask me about the so-called incident.

He had the chance to stop the editorial in the first place, but when the editor realized Butterworth was so dense, he saw a chance to embarrass the United States and the man running for reelection as Prime Minister. It’s funny because the P.M. is not particularly pro-Russian and the two things don’t go together. The press man at the embassy was also totally inadequate. Fortunately, the Secret Service boys kept their heads or it would have been much worse. Butterworth wanted them to apologize, which would have been ridiculous. . . . I hate to bother you with this but I have never seen firsthand before a man in high position try to put the blame on the little man who couldn’t fight back, namely the Secret Service boys.

To my amazement, when I returned home I discovered Secretary of State Acheson and everyone else in the State Department defended Ambassador Butterworth’s behavior. For the first time, I got a look at how closely they stick together down in Foggy Bottom. It made me understand why my father never stopped wishing someone would shake up the State Department.

One mission I did accomplish successfully for Dad was to bring home from England a bottle of Truman’s beer. Dad often teased Cousin Ethel, our family historian, about the fact that Truman’s Beer and Ale is one of the biggest and best-known breweries in England. Cousin Ethel always winced every time she heard the family name associated with the liquor business. The next time Dad went home to Independence, he strolled over to the Noland house and gave Cousin Ethel this sample of the handiwork of the English Trumans. Obviously Dad never forgot one of Mamma Truman’s favorite sayings, “Being too good is apt to be uninteresting,”

I ended my letter from Sweden with some advice Dad didn’t need. “Give it to ‘em on September 1st and show everybody who’s still on top and in control of the situation.”

By this time, the presidential campaign was on its way. The Republicans did exactly what Dad predicted they would do in his Jefferson-Jackson Day speech. They abandoned bipartisanship in foreign policy completely and conjured up the black-is-white story that “Korea was born at Yalta.” General MacArthur gave the keynote address at their convention, predictably blaming the Democrats for everything in sight. Herbert Hoover cried out against “our bewildered statesmanship” and John Foster Dulles declared, in the foreign policy plank of the Republican platform, that the Democrats had “lost the peace.” Dad was blamed for allowing Russia to absorb Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and China. For a final whopper, Dulles, the negotiator of the Japanese treaty and a constant companion of Democratic officials in the State Department declared, “In the main, the Republican Party has been ignored and its participation not even invited.” Arthur Vandenberg must have spun in his grave on that one.

Dad was not in the least surprised by Dulles’s political tactics. At one point during 1948, Dulles returned home from a conference with the Russians in Paris and did not even bother to pay a courtesy call at the White House. Instead, he went directly to Albany to report to the man he thought was going to be the next President - Thomas E. Dewey. Not a few of Dad’s aides were outraged by this snub and urged him to fire Dulles forthwith. But Dad felt his foreign policy was more important than his personal pride, and he passed over the insult in silence.

He got a modicum of revenge in 1949, when Dulles ran against Herbert Lehman in an off-year election for the seat of the late Senator Robert Wagner. Dulles paid a call on Dad before the campaign began, and they got into a friendly discussion of who was going to win the election. Dad told him he thought Senator Lehman would win because he knew how to talk to the average man in New York. “You’ll get off on a high international plane,” Dad said joshingly. “You’ve been making millions for the big fellows so long you don’t know what people really think or what they’re like.” ( Dulles had been a very successful Wall Street lawyer.)

He declined to take Dad’s advice and campaigned precisely as Dad had predicted he would - making large oracular statements like his mentor, Dewey. Lehman trounced him easily. The following day, Dad got a telegram that read: “YOU WIN. JOHN FOSTER DULLES.”

Among the Republican campaign promises in 1952 were even bigger whoppers than the speechmakers told at their convention. They said they would repudiate the Yalta agreements and secure the “genuine independence” of peoples who had become Communist captives. How silly these claims looked later.

One of the stars of the Republican convention was Senator Joe McCarthy, who was introduced as “Wisconsin’s fighting Marine.” Ike should have seen the trouble coming his way when Joe called Douglas MacArthur “the greatest American that was ever born.” He also said my father had started the Korean War for “publicity purposes” and urged everyone to study his “documents” in the Exhibition Hall which proved the government was still infested by Communists. They proved nothing, of course. They were just his usual gobbledygook.

These tactics aroused my father’s deep concern and made him all the more uneasy, because, right up to the eve of the Democratic Convention, Adlai Stevenson was still playing Hamlet. He even begged the Illinois delegation not to put his name in nomination.

On July 24, three days after the convention opened, my father, who had stayed in Washington worrying about Korea and other problems, got a phone call from Stevenson. He asked if it would embarrass him if he allowed his name to be placed in nomination. Dad hit the ceiling. He told Stevenson in very blunt terms what he thought about his indecision. “I have been trying since January to get you to say that. Why would it embarrass me?”

Stevenson did not realize how close my father had come to not supporting him. About two weeks before the convention, Alben Barkley asked Dad if he would support him for the presidency. Although he still felt the “Veep” was too old for the job, my father said yes, largely because none of the other candidates aroused any enthusiasm in him. But when Barkley went to Chicago to line up delegates, he found the influential labor leaders at the convention unanimously opposed to him. On the day the convention opened, he called Dad and dejectedly informed him he was going to withdraw, and this freed my father from his obligation - which he would have regarded as irrevocable - to support the vice president. Barkley was so painfully disappointed that Dad telephoned the Democratic Chairman, Frank McKinney, and urged him to give the Veep the consolation of a farewell speech. He did so, and on the morning of July 23, Barkley gave one of his greatest talks, full of that wonderful humor and ridicule of Republicans and their pompous ways that by now had become his trademark.

Meanwhile, the convention was plunging toward chaos. Senator Kefauver, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, Harriman, and Governor Stevenson all had blocs of supporters and none seemed capable of building up a majority. Visions of earlier Democratic Conventions, where discord had torn the party apart, began haunting my father. He decided to intervene powerfully on Stevenson’s behalf. He telephoned the man who was sitting in for him on the Missouri delegation, Tom Gavin, and told him to spread the word the President was behind Stevenson. But the governor of Illinois was still having trouble mustering majority support when Dad’s plane landed at Midway Airport in Chicago on July 25.

My father had a political ace which he was now prepared to play. When Averell Harriman discussed making the race, Dad had told him his candidacy had his approval - but not his backing - quite a different thing in party politics. He also wanted him to agree to one thing. If the convention was deadlocked, he would help him nominate the strongest candidate. My father made it clear that in his opinion this was Adlai Stevenson. Averell, a good party man, had agreed.

Now Dad told Charlie Murphy to find Harriman and order him to withdraw in Stevenson’s favor. Harriman, knowing my father was in town and foreseeing the request, withdrew even before Charlie reached him. The addition of Harriman’s 121 delegates sent Stevenson stock soaring, and he was elected on the next ballot. Dad took him out on the platform and introduced him, declaring: “You have nominated a winner, and I am going to take off my coat and do everything I can to help him win.”

This is exactly what he did. But the campaign was doomed almost from the start by Stevenson’s poor political judgment. No one liked Stevenson more than the Trumans. Even after he lost, my father regarded him as a great spokesman for the Democratic Party. But the governor lacked the will and the force to win a presidential campaign. Among his many mistakes, the greatest one he made was his attempt to run as a new species of independent Democrat, with very little interest in defending the record of the Democratic administration he was hoping to succeed. He even let Richard Nixon, Joe McCarthy, and the other purveyors of the Communists-in-government big lie put him on the defensive. Equally galling to Dad was Stevenson’s admission that there was “a mess in Washington” that he would clean up. Thus, he capitulated to two of the worst Republican smears. From an organizational point of view, the campaign was an even worse fiasco. Stevenson set up his own headquarters in Springfield, and there was little liaison between his people and the White House.

My father did his utmost to cooperate with Stevenson, in spite of these problems. In a letter he wrote to him on August 16, 1952, he could not have been more forthright about his motives: “Again, I want to say to you that I am at your disposal to help win the election and I also want you to understand that there is nothing further that can add to my career as a public servant. As I told you when you were here . . . I think there comes a time when every politician whether he be in a County, State or Federal office, should retire. Most of them find it impossible to do that - they either have to be carried out feet first or kicked out. I made up my mind in 1949 that that would not happen to me if I could get the national picture on a basis that would prevent world war three and maintain a domestic program that would give all sections of the population fair treatment.”

Most of the time Stevenson’s mistakes made my father more sad than mad. It was General Eisenhower who really aroused his wrath. Eisenhower tried, for a while, to confine himself to glittering generalities and stay above the battle. But one of his biggest supporters, the Scripps-Howard newspapers, warned him his campaign “was running like a dry creek.” Then Senator Taft had a famous conference with the General, in which he extracted from him a promise to attack the Democratic Party’s foreign and domestic policies. When Ike started accusing the Democrats of betraying the United States at Yalta and failing to foresee the menace of Russian aggression thereafter, Dad boiled. He promptly quoted Ike’s words before a committee of Congress in 1945. “There is no one thing,” Ike said, “that guides the policy of Russia more today than to keep friendship with the United States.”

When I was going to school [Dad said], we had an old professor who was interested in teaching us how to make up our minds and make decisions. The lesson was on the history of battles of the War between the States and the discussion was on the battle of Gettysburg. And some kid in class got up and said what Lee should have done and what Meade should have done and this old professor said, “Now, young man, that’s all very fine, but any schoolboy’s hindsight is worth a great deal more than all General Lee’s and General Meade’s foresight.”

I can say the same thing about Ike. His hindsight may be extra good, but his foresight isn’t any better than anybody else’s.

This was one of my father’s strongest convictions. More than once, he said to reporters and others who criticized his administration, “Any schoolboy’s hindsight is worth a President’s foresight.”

What troubled my father was the fact that Ike was attacking policies he had helped to formulate and carry out. This seemed to Dad 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, perhaps 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.

In late September, we launched a whistle-stop tour to Hungry Horse, Montana, to dedicate a new dam there. After almost eight years as President, Dad was as tireless as ever, making six and eight speeches a day and wearing out everyone else on the train, including yours truly.

In the Public Papers of Harry S. Truman, 1952, the following entry appears on page 648:

HUNGRY HORSE, MONTANA (Rear platform, 9:45 a.m.)

Thank you very much for this souvenir of the horse.

That makes a pair of them.

I appreciate the privilege of being here. It has been a fine morning - had a good look at the project down here, and I am going to tell you something about it when I get “downtown.”

Where’s Margaret?

Margaret had committed the unpardonable sin of not getting up that morning. I was teased unmercifully all the way across the rest of the country. But I got even with him in Ohio, later in the campaign. There, Mike Disalle, who was running for the Senate, introduced Dad as “Margaret Truman’s father.”

As always, Dad could take it as well as dish it out. “I’m a back number already,” he said, ruefully.

There were times during the campaign when I think Dad’s humor came close to matching Adlai Stevenson’s - but I am a prejudiced witness. Defending the governor’s use of humor in his speeches, Dad said: “They have been poking fun at our candidate, Governor Stevenson, because he likes to put his audiences in a good humor. I found a quotation, I think, that will cover that. It is an admonition in Matthew 6. It says, ‘Be not as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance.’ “

In Troy, Montana, he told his listeners the GOP stood for “the General’s Own Party,” or to put it another way, “the Party of the Generals.”

“There’s a lot of truth in that,” Dad said. “The Republicans have General Motors and General Electric and General Foods and General MacArthur and General Martin and General Wedemeyer. And then they have their own five-star General who is running for President. . . . I want to say to you that every general I know is on this list except general welfare, and general welfare is in with the corporals and the privates in the Democratic Party.”

When Ike tried to argue that our World War II decision not to advance to Berlin and the 1947 decision to withdraw our troops from Korea were “political” mistakes which forced later military action, my father really let him have it. “He was personally involved in our decisions about Berlin and Korea,” he told his listeners in a speech in Oakland. “He knows what happened in those cases and so do I.” Dad went on to point out the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended withdrawing our troops from Korea in 1947. “The Chief of Staff of the Army, a man who joined in this recommendation, is the man who is now the Republican candidate for President.”

As for Berlin, my father revealed he had ordered Ike to work out with the Russians unrestricted access to Berlin as a condition to withdrawing our troops to the Occupation Zone lines. Ike delegated this job to General Lucius Clay. All Clay got from the Russians was an oral assurance, instead of a precise agreement in writing: “Our troops were withdrawn, our bargaining position was lost and our right of access was never firmly established. General Clay, in his book, admits that this was a mistake. He is honest about it. He doesn’t blame the civilian side of the government - which had nothing whatever to do with it. He doesn’t even blame the commanding officer. But his commanding officer should, I think, step up and share some of the blame. The responsibility to arrange free access to Berlin lay squarely on that commanding officer, for I put it there.”

As for Ike’s statement that our plan of global resistance to communism was “a program of bits and pieces . . . an endless game of makeshift and make believe,” my father said he never thought he would hear words like those from the lips of the man who was now the Republican candidate: “He is a man who knows the toil and cost of building defenses, cementing alliances, and inspiring a common purpose in the hearts and minds of free peoples. He is aware of how easy and how dangerous it is to destroy the common faith and purpose on which the whole structure of our security is built, and yet he does not seem to hesitate now to utter the reckless words that can bring that structure down to ruin.”

Ike’s problem, Dad declared, was that he had fallen into the hands of the “Republican snollygosters.” Dad fell in love with this wonderful word during this campaign. For those who don’t know the political slang of the early 1900s, a snollygoster is a politician who is all words and very little action.

Dad had a lot of fun making Ike squirm over things he had said in earlier years. One of his favorite quotes, which Dad repeated at numerous whistle-stops, was Ike’s 1945 statement withdrawing himself from the presidential race: “Nothing in the international or domestic situation especially qualifies for the most important office in the world a man whose adult years have been spent in the country’s military forces. At least, this is true in my case.”

Dad would add with a grin: “It was true then. It is true now.”

Dad had even more fun with another Eisenhower gaffe. Ike was fond of calling his campaign a crusade, and at one point, he declared his model was Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads. Dad quickly pointed out, “Oliver Cromwell may have had his points, but his crusade, as I recall it, was one that started out as a matter of principle and finished up by destroying parliamentary government and butchering women and children. God save us from a crusade like that.”

But when my father talked about Ike and General Marshall, his tone grew harsh. “If there is any one man to whom the Republican candidate owes a great debt of loyalty and gratitude, that man is George Catlett Marshall.” He would then condemn without reservation Ike’s support of Joe McCarthy and William Jenner. “Don’t let anybody tell you that every Presidential candidate has to do that - that it is just part of politics. Franklin Roosevelt did not endorse every Democrat, and neither did Harry Truman. Governor Dewey in 1948 did not endorse Republicans who had disgraced the Republican label. But the Republican candidate this year did, with the same betrayal of principle he has shown throughout his campaign.”

During most of the campaign, Dad had very little to say about General Eisenhower’s running mate, Senator Richard M. Nixon of California. He made no comment on Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, where he discussed the virtues of his cocker spaniel to exonerate himself from implications of corruption arising from some $18,000 given him by a “millionaire’s club” of wealthy Republicans. Several times Dad refused to say whether he thought this fund was ethical or not. He took the position that this was something the public could decide for themselves. Following the Biblical injunction to “judge not,” Dad always hesitated to take ethical stands on the actions of his fellow politicians. Privately, however, Dad made it clear that the fund confirmed his longstanding opinion of Nixon - that he was a spokesman for special interests.

For a while, the election looked close. At the very least, Candidate Eisenhower knew he was in the fight of his life. Along with the smears and lies Dad was continually rebutting, the Republicans threw in a few dirty tricks aimed specifically at our campaign train. A “Truth Squad” followed us around the country, issuing statements that supposedly countered Dad’s speeches. In Buffalo, they hired a horde of school children who tried to drown out Dad with screams and catcalls, anticipating by twenty years the Students for a Democratic Society. It just proves extremists from either end of the political spectrum have more in common than they think.

Finally, Candidate Eisenhower let one of his speech writers put into his mouth words that completely, totally infuriated my father. In a speech in Detroit, Ike announced he would “go to Korea in person if elected and put an end to the fighting.” As politics, it was a master stroke. 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 the South Koreans would do all the fighting, and our troops could come home. “While he is on the back platform of his train, holding out this glowing hope,” my father said angrily, “his staff are in the press car pointing out to reporters that he has not said when he would be able to do this. And he knows very well he can’t do it, without surrendering Korea - until the present Korean conflict is at an end.”

If Ike had a solution to the war, my father wanted to know why Ike had not given it to him when he was serving the President as one of his top military advisers. Mockingly, he asked Ike to give it to him now. “Let’s save a lot of lives and not wait - not do a lot of demagoguery and say that he can do it after he’s elected. If he can do it after he is elected, we can do it now.”

Alas, it was all in vain. On Election Day, General Ike went rampaging to a tremendous personal victory. Dad took some consolation in noting the Democrats had actually won more congressional votes - although their distribution enabled the Republicans to capture control of Congress by a very narrow margin, one seat in the Senate and twelve in the House. “The people were voting for their great military hero,” Dad concluded in a letter to Winston Churchill.

My father sent the President-elect a telegram of congratulations, in which he made a point of saying, “The Independence will be at your disposal if you still desire to go to Korea.” Ike made the trip, which of course accomplished nothing.

Except for that one partisan jab, my father stopped playing politics the moment the election was over. His chief concern became the orderly transfer of power. He was determined Dwight Eisenhower would not have to undergo the ordeal Harry S. Truman experienced when he was catapulted into the presidency. He remembered from his reading and observation of earlier administrations how outgoing and incoming Presidents, particularly when they were of different parties, tended to have as little as possible to do with each other. In a world on the edge of total violence, this was unthinkable. My father boldly changed the pattern, setting an historic precedent.

In his congratulatory telegram, he made his first overture toward cooperation:

THE 1954 BUDGET MUST BE PRESENTED TO THE CONGRESS BEFORE JANUARY 15TH. ALL PRELIMINARY FIGURES HAVE BEEN MADE UP. YOU SHOULD HAVE A REPRESENTATIVE MEET WITH THE DIRECTOR OF THE BUDGET IMMEDIATELY.

When Ike accepted this offer, my father sent him a second message:

I KNOW YOU WILL AGREE WITH ME THAT THERE OUGHT TO BE AN ORDERLY TRANSFER OF THE BUSINESS OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH OF THE GOVERNMENT TO THE NEW ADMINISTRATION, PARTICULARLY IN VIEW OF THE INTERNATIONAL DANGERS AND PROBLEMS THAT CONFRONT THIS COUNTRY AND THE WHOLE FREE WORLD. I INVITE YOU, THEREFORE, TO MEET WITH ME IN THE WHITE HOUSE AT YOUR EARLY CONVENIENCE TO DISCUSS THE PROBLEM OF THIS TRANSITION, SO THAT IT MAY BE CLEAR TO ALL THE WORLD THAT THIS NATION IS UNITED IN ITS STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM AND PEACE.

Again Eisenhower accepted the offer and a meeting was set for November 18. Ike arrived at 2:00 p.m. with Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Joseph M. Dodge, as his aides. First, Ike went into Dad’s office, and they had a private conversation. Here is the unadorned, rather blunt memorandum which my father made on their talk, two days later:

The President Elect came to see me day before yesterday, Nov. 18, 1952. When he came into the President’s office he had a chip on his shoulder. . . .

I told him when he came into the Presidential office that all I had in mind is an orderly turnover to him. . . . I offered to leave the pictures of Hidalgo, the Mexican Liberator, given to me for the Presidential office, San Martin given to me by the Argentine Government and Bolivar, given to me by the Venezuelan Government, in the President’s office. I was informed very curtly, that I’d do well to take them with me - that the Governments of these countries would, no doubt, give the new President the same pictures! Then I gave him the world globe that he used in World War II which he had given me at Frankfort when I went to Potsdam. He accepted that - not very graciously.

I told him that I wanted to turn the Administrative Branch of the Government over to him as a going concern and that I had instructed my White House Staff and all Cabinet Officers to cooperate in this undertaking.

Ike asked me if I had a Chief of Staff in the White House. I told him that there is an Assistant to the President, Dr. John Steelman, who coordinates the differences between Cabinet Officers and between the President’s Secretaries, but that any member of the Cabinet and any Secretary or Administrative Assistant is at liberty to see the President at any time on any subject.

I advised him that his Appointment Secretary would be his personal contact with the public. I told him that this man must be a real diplomat, able to say “No” nine-tenths of the time and make no one angry. I told him that his Press Secretary must be able to keep press and radio-television in line. He must be familiar with reporters’ problems and be able to stand between the President and the press and radio. I advised him to obtain a correspondence secretary who could suggest answers to 75% of the mail, keep track of birthdays, special days, proclamations and be able to write letters he could sign after reading the first paragraph.

I told him he must have Assistants who could talk to State, Treasury, Commerce and Labor, that he must have one to act as personnel officer to head off job hunters and to investigate and make recommendations for all positions filled by Presidential appointments. I informed him that he should have a “minority group” assistant to hear complaints and assuage the hurt feelings of Negroes, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Indians and any other groups including Poles, Lithuanians, Irish and what have you.

I think all this went into one ear and out the other.

After this private talk, Ike, my father, and their advisers gathered for a seminar on the world problems the nation was facing. Acheson did most of the lecturing. He noted alarming weaknesses in our UN allies in regard to the principle of no forced repatriation of prisoners of war in Korea, and discussed NATO, Southeast Asia, U.S. commercial policy abroad, and other pressing matters. The Republicans just took notes and made no comment, except for one point in the statement which was issued at the end of the meeting. Henry Cabot Lodge refused to allow Ike to agree to oppose forced repatriation of the Korean War prisoners. Since this was the main reason why Dad wanted the meeting, he was very disappointed. A proposal by the Indian representative at the UN, which compromised on this vital issue through a smoke screen of double-talk, was in danger of passing. The Democrats were left to fight - and win - that battle on their own. When Ike departed, Dad had the feeling he “had not grasped the immense job ahead of him.”

Eisenhower obviously thought he could run the White House the way he ran the army. “He’ll sit right here,” Dad said, “and he’ll say do this, do that!! And nothing will happen. Poor Ike - it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”

On that score, I think the history of the Eisenhower Administration made Dad a good prophet.

As the time grew near for our departure from the White House, Dad became more and more philosophic about politics. Perhaps he also had a little more time to write memoranda to himself. Here is one of my favorites:

Had a memo from Mr. Lovett on plane production, prepared by the Sec. for Air and a Munitions Report which were most encouraging. Bob gave me a definition of a statistician - “A man who draws a straight line from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion.” I gave him one for a consultant Washington style - ‘An ordinary citizen away from home.”

Came over to the House after a long session with a new chairman of the Dem. Committee.

Bess and I talk to Margie at 6:30 on a three way hookup. We go down to the south porch at seven for dinner - a good dinner too - tenderloin of some kind, really tender, asparagus, and a cooked stuffed tomato, then a large piece of thick, light yellow cake with caramel sauce.

One of our squirrels comes up to the table and asks for a bite to eat. Turns up his nose at a crumb of bread soaked in cooked tomato juice. We send for some crackers and he accepts pieces of cracker and goes under a chair each time, sits up and eats. Bess hands him the pieces one at a time until he has eaten three whole crackers. Then without a bow or a thank you he walks down the steps and disappears. But he’ll be back tomorrow night as usual for more to eat.

Mr. Hopkins, the chief clerk, informed me when I signed the documents and letters this afternoon that the mail had fallen below 5000 letters today for the first time since I’ve been President. I asked him a foolish question - why? The diplomatic chief clerk informed me that the mail always decreased in volume at the end of an Administration, particularly when the White House occupant was not coming back. Well, it is “The King is dead - Long live the king.”

It is fortunate that I’ve never taken an attitude that the kudos and kow-tows are made to me as an individual. I knew always that the greatest office in the history of the world was getting them, and Harry S. Truman as an individual was not. I hope I’m still the country man from Missouri.

Even though the Democrats had lost the election, Dad and the members of his Cabinet continued to work toward many Democratic goals, right up to the final hours of his administration. On December 2, Attorney General James McGranery submitted an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in support of five cases filed by black plaintiffs challenging segregation in the field of education. Quoting Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Attorney General McGranery argued racial discrimination had to be viewed in the context of “the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny.” He said segregation furnished grist for Communist propaganda mills and raised doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic way of life.

Dad had, of course, already achieved a landmark breakthrough in the fight against segregation with his Executive Order 8802, abolishing segregation in the armed forces. On May 22, 1950, a presidential committee gave him a report, “Freedom to Serve,” which spelled out in detail why the Pentagon was now convinced equality of opportunity would produce “a better army, navy and air force.” Later, Dad issued Executive Order 10210 banning discrimination against any person on the ground of race, creed, or color in the companies of all contractors and subcontractors working for the federal government.

In these final White House days, Dad also displayed one of his greatest gifts, his ability to laugh at himself.

We had dinner at seven as usual, discussed ghosts, hosts and who’d died in the White House, and then dressed up and went across Lafayette Square to celebrate the anniversary of the new U.S.O. in the old Belasco Theater building. Mrs. T. had and has been interested in U.S.O. work so they wanted her to cut the birthday cake. Well, we all, Mrs. T., Margie and the President, dressed up and went over to the U.S.O. The Boss cut the birthday cake, they drew a number out of a box for the one to get the first slice that the First Lady cut, and a Marine won! The President made some asinine remarks, and we came back to the White House.

In that same memorandum, Dad recorded a pretty good joke which the White House played on us. You will recall his conviction that the old place was really haunted. It was also drafty. When the wind was northwest, it came whistling down the fireplace in the corner of my bedroom. To protect myself from this chilly blast, I had a bridge table leaning against the fireplace. I’ll let Dad tell the rest of the story:

It was agreed we’d go to bed at once because Margie and I had to board the train for Philadelphia at 8:15 tomorrow to go to the Army-Navy football game - our last appearance officially at this function. Mrs. T. can’t go because of her mother’s condition.

Well, I went to bed and read a hair-raiser in Adventure. Just as I arrived at a bloody incident, the Madam bursts into my bedroom through the hall door and shouted, “Did you hear that awful noise?”

I hadn’t and said so - not a popular statement. So I put on my bathrobe and made an investigation.

What do you think I found after looking all around? Why that Margie’s bridge table had fallen from in front of the fireplace in her bedroom and knocked over the fireguard!

It must have made a grand ghost sound where Margie and her mamma were sitting in Mrs. T.’s sitting room!

I didn’t hear it. What a relief when the cause of the noise was discovered by me. I left two very happy ladies and went back to bed.

Our last days at the White House were a mingling of joy and sadness. On December 4, we had a formal dinner for all the members of the Cabinet and their wives, as well as the regular White House aides. Dad made the following note on it: “It was a grand affair. I told those present how I appreciated the advice, help and assistance I’d received from all of them and that if I’d had any success as the President of the United States, the greatest office in the history of the world, they had made it possible. The Chief Justice responded in a wonderful tribute to me.”

The following day, Grandmother Wallace died at 12:37 p.m. She had been ill for several weeks and had been in a coma for the last few days of her life. It was a little awesome, to think of the way the world had changed in the ninety years she had lived. It redoubled my feeling of things coming to a close, of history changing direction.

After the New Year, Prime Minister Churchill arrived for another visit and enlivened our spirits immensely, as he always did. In the course of his stay, my father gave him a small stag dinner to which he invited Robert Lovett, Averell Harriman, General Omar Bradley, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Everyone was in an ebullient mood, especially Dad. Without warning, Churchill turned to him and said, “Mr. President, I hope you have your answer ready for that hour when you and I stand before Saint Peter and he says, ‘I understand you two are responsible for putting off those atomic bombs. What have you got to say for yourselves?’ “

This could have been a rather unpleasant subject. But Bob Lovett, who is as witty as he is brilliant, came to the rescue. “Are you sure, Prime Minister, that you are going to be in the same place as the President for that interrogation?”

Churchill sipped his champagne and then intoned, “Lovett, my vast respect for the creator of this universe and countless others gives me assurance that he would not condemn a man without a hearing.”

“True,” said Lovett, “but your hearing would not be likely to start in the Supreme Court, or, necessarily, in the same court as the President’s. It could be in another court far away.”

“I don’t know about that,” rumbled Churchill, “but wherever it is, it will be in accordance with the principles of the English Common Law.”

“Is it altogether consistent with your respect for the creator of this and other universes,” Dean Acheson asked, “to limit his imagination and judicial procedure to the accomplishment of a minute island, in a tiny world, in one of the smaller of the universes?”

Churchill was somewhat taken aback by this observation. “Well,” he said, “there will be a trial by a jury of my peers, that’s certain.”

Now the conversation was really soaring. “Oyez! Oyez!” cried our Secretary of State. “In the matter of the immigration of Winston Spencer Churchill. Mr. Bailiff, will you empanel a jury?”

Everyone eagerly accepted historic roles. General Bradley decided he was Alexander the Great. Others played Julius Caesar, Socrates, and Aristotle. The prime minister declined to permit Voltaire on his jury - he was an atheist - or Oliver Cromwell, because he did not believe in the rule of law. Then Acheson summoned George Washington. That was too much for Churchill. He saw that things were being stacked against him. “I waive a jury,” he announced, “but not habeas corpus.”

They ignored him and completed the selection of the jury. Dad was appointed judge. The case was tried, and the prime minister was acquitted.

Later in the evening he served as judge in an argument which compared Dad’s merits as a statesman to his demerits as a pianist. The prime minister sat as judge and declared in favor of the President’s statesmanship.

During this visit, Churchill confessed to Dad that he had been very pessimistic when Harry Truman succeeded Franklin Roosevelt. “I misjudged you badly,” the prime minister said. “Since that time, you, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.”

Finally came January 20, 1953, our farewell day. We had finished packing, and I put on my dress for the last time in the White House. Outside, the atmosphere was chilly, both politically and meteorologically. Part of it, I will freely admit, was Dad’s fault. In the middle of December, he had become very riled when General Douglas MacArthur announced he wanted to talk to President-elect Eisenhower because he had a solution to the war in Korea. Ike immediately rushed to confer with the deposed Far Eastern General. Angrily, Dad told reporters if General MacArthur had a solution to the war, he should come to Washington and inform the Defense Department immediately. Then he tore into Ike’s trip to Korea, which he made immediately after conferring with MacArthur. Reporters noted Ike had said he had no “trick solution” for Korea. Dad wryly replied, “He was quoting me. I made the statement quite some time ago in the campaign.” Then he called the trip “a piece of demagoguery.

“Ike resented these remarks, but it seems to me that he should have realized Inauguration Day was hardly the time to display his pique. It was traditional for the outgoing President to have the incoming President to a pre-inaugural lunch at the White House. The Eisenhowers coldly rejected our invitation. Then Ike tried to force Dad to pick him up at the Statler Hotel en route to the inauguration ceremonies. Dad, very conscious of the fact that he was still President, replied, “If Ike doesn’t pick me up, then we’ll go in separate cars.”

The President-elect capitulated, but when he arrived at the White House to pick Dad up, he refused to get out and greet us inside the house, in the traditional manner. Rather than hold up the inauguration, Dad came out and got in the car.

There was very little conversation during their one-mile ride to the Capitol. Ike remarked that he had not come to the 1948 inauguration because he did not want to attract attention from the President.

“You were not here in 1948 because I did not send for you,” Dad said. “But if I had sent for you, you would have come.”

When they reached the Capitol, they went to the sergeant-at-arms’s office to wait for the summons to the platform. Ike suddenly turned to Dad and said: “I wonder who is responsible for my son John being ordered to Washington from Korea? I wonder who is trying to embarrass me?”

“The President of the United States ordered your son to attend your inauguration,” Dad said. “If you think somebody was trying to embarrass you by this order, then the President assumes full responsibility.”

My father had ordered John Eisenhower home from Korea as a gesture of thoughtfulness. He was not serving in the front lines, or in any particularly vital role in the army, so there was no reason to accuse either his father or Dad of favoritism, or of endangering the public interest. It astonished Dad that Ike resented this gesture. It still astonishes me.

On the way to the inaugural platform, I walked in the procession, several dignitaries behind Dad and Mother. Suddenly a man stepped from the crowd and kissed me on the cheek. I turned and found myself being embraced by General Marshall. That was the first and only time I felt a little sad at the 1952 inauguration. We were saying goodbye to so many wonderful people.

After the ceremony, we piled into a White House limousine and headed for a luncheon at Secretary Acheson’s house. As we rolled through the crowded streets, I was suddenly struck by a wild thought. I turned - I was sitting on the jump seat - and looking straight at Dad said, “Hello, Mr. Truman.”

He got the joke immediately, and loved it. It was the first time since I was born - give or take one year when I was too young to know what was going on - when he was not sporting an official title.

A crowd of about 500 people was waiting for us outside the Acheson house. They startled us with a round of cheers. You might have thought we had just been reelected. The luncheon was attended by all the Cabinet members and ex-Cabinet members and White House aides. It was an absolutely wonderful affair, full of jokes and laughter and a few tears. Especially when Dad made a little speech, reiterating how grateful he was for all they had done to help him. Then we were back in the limousine, and on our way to Union Station, where the presidential car was waiting to take Dad and Mother to Independence. I was going to stay in Washington overnight and return to New York.

If we were startled by the crowd around the Acheson house at the end of Ρ Street, we were amazed by the mob scene in Union Station. At least 5,000 people were in the concourse, shouting and cheering. It was like the 1944 and 1948 conventions. The police had to form a flying wedge to get us to the Ferdinand Magellan. Inside, the party started all over again. Members of the press who had spent eight years tearing Dad apart came in to mumble apologies and swear they never meant a word of it. Half the executive branch of the government seemed to be trying to shake his hand, or, in the case of the ladies, give him a kiss. He soon had lipstick all over his face. We finally had to call a halt to it, so the train could get out of the station on something approximating its schedule. Dad went out to the old familiar rear platform and gave them a farewell salute:

May I say to you that I appreciate this more than any meeting I have ever attended as President or Vice President or Senator. This is the greatest demonstration that any man could have, because I’m just Mr. Truman, private citizen now.

This is the first time you have ever sent me home in a blaze of glory. I can’t adequately express my appreciation for what you are doing. I’ll never forget it if I live to be a hundred.

And that’s just what I expect to do!

I got off the train and stood beside Mrs. Fred Vinson as it pulled out. Everybody in the station started singing “Auld Lang Syne.” It was absolutely thunderous. Beside me, Mommy Vinson was weeping. But I didn’t feel in the least weepy now. This tremendous outpouring of affection for Dad was too wonderful. It made all those years in the Great White Jail almost worthwhile.