Back in Grandview, Harry got a letter from Bess, reiterating her change of heart. His answer explained his silence on Sunday - and announced his almost delirious happiness.

Your letter has made a confirmed optimist out of me sure enough. I know now that everything is good and grand and this footstool is a fine place to be. I have been all up in the air, clear above earth ever since it came. I guess you thought I didn’t have much sense Sunday, but I just couldn’t say anything - only just sit and look. It doesn’t seem real that you should care for me. I have always hoped you would but some way feared very much you wouldn’t. You know, I’ve always thought that the best man in the world is hardly good enough for any woman. But when it comes to the best girl in all the universe caring for an ordinary gink like me - well, you’ll have to let me get used to it.

Do you want to be a farmer? Or shall I do some other business? When Mamma wins her suit and we get all the lawyers and things out of the way I will then have a chance for myself. We intend to raise a four-hundred-acre wheat crop, which if it hits will put us out of the woods. If we lose, which I don’t think about, it will mean starting all over for me. . . . I sure want to have a decent place to ask you to. I’m hoping it won’t be long. I wish it was tomorrow. Let’s get engaged anyway to see how it feels. No one need know it but you and me until we get ready to tell it anyway. If you see a man you think more of in the meantime, engagements are easy enough broken. I’ve always said I’d have you or no one and that’s what I mean to do.

Harry’s sense of disbelief at his good fortune persisted for the rest of the week and still pervaded his mind during their next date, for which he had tickets to a hit musical, The Girl from Utah. Sitting in the theater, holding Bess’ hand, he heard the show’s leading man sing a ballad by an up-and-coming new songwriter, Jerome Kern. Its title was: “They’ll Never Believe Me.” It struck him as uncanny, as he listened to the singer tell the leading lady that he could not believe someone so wonderful had fallen in love with him. The words were a perfect summary of Harry’s feelings. He would remember the song and the experience for the rest of his life.

Then he recalled Bess’ baffled cry and began worrying if his dream had really come true. “Bess, why am I an enigma?” he asked. “I try to be just what I am and tell the truth about as much as the average person. If there’s anything you don’t understand, I’ll try and explain it or remedy it.”

In another letter, he tried to explain why he found it hard to express his feelings to her in person: “You really didn’t know I had so much softness and sentimentality in me, did you? I’m full of it. But I’d die if I had to talk it. I can tell you on paper how much I love you and what one grand woman I think you [are], but to tell it to you I can’t. I’m always afraid I’d do it clumsily and you’d laugh. Then I’d die really. When a person’s airing his most sacred thoughts he’s very easily distressed. No one ever knew I ever had any but you. You are the one girl I’d ever want to tell them to. I could die happy doing something for you. (Just imagine a guy with spectacles and a girl mouth doing the Sir Lancelot.) Since I can’t rescue you from any monster or carry you from a burning building or save you from a sinking ship - simply because I’d be afraid of the monsters, couldn’t carry you and can’t swim - I’ll have to go to work and make money enough to pay my debts and then get you to take me for what I am: just a common everyday man whose instincts are to be ornery, who’s anxious to be right. You’ll not have any trouble getting along with me for I’m awful good-natured, and I’m sure we’d live happy ever after sure enough. I’m writing this at 1 a.m. just because I can’t help it and if you get tired of it . . . put it in the kitchen stove. . . . If you don’t like mushy letters, just tell me so. I never had any desire to write them before or to preach my own good points so strongly.”

Bess was not entirely pleased by Harry’s assurance that if she decided to break their engagement and marry someone else, he would understand. A little tartly, she told him that if he met another girl he liked better, he had the same freedom. Harry insisted this was out of the question. He combined this reiteration of his love with some interesting comments on his ambitions: “You were most awful nice about the other girl but don’t suppose they’ll ever be one. If a fellow can pick his idol at ten and still be loyal to it at thirty, there’s not much danger of his finding another. One or two of my aunties and good matron friends have sought to arrange things for me several times but could never understand why they never had any luck. Maybe they will before long. How does it feel being engaged to a clodhopper who has ambitions to be Governor of Montana and Chief Executive of U.S. He’ll do well if he gets to be a retired farmer. That sure was a good dream though, and I have them in the daytime . . . along the same line, it looks like an uphill business sometimes though. But I intend to keep peggin’ away and I suppose I’ll arrive at something. You’ll never be sorry if you take me for better or for worse because I’ll always try to make it better.”

Although he poured out all this emotion, Harry still signed his letters “Most sincerely.” A reason for this odd hesitation may have been a worry that he aired at the end of one letter, a few weeks after Bess told him of her change of heart. “Do you suppose your mother’ll care for me well enough to have me in her family?” By this time, he had been visiting the Wallace and Gates families long enough to grasp Madge Gates Wallace’s formidable presence in her daughter’s life and the lives of her other children. He had also detected Madge’s polite, subtle antagonism to him and his pursuit of Bess.

The desire to make some money in a hurry inclined Harry to cast his eyes beyond Missouri’s borders to Montana and Wyoming where a lucky few got rich mining silver and other metals. Both politics and business were more wide open there, which is why he could entertain thoughts about becoming Montana’s governor. But he soon became more realistic about Montana. “It’s such a beautiful climate up there. Only forty-seven below last winter. The wind sometimes blows sixty miles an hour straight from Alaska.”

For a few months, it looked like the Truman luck was going to turn. Early in 1914, the lawsuit was settled in Mamma Truman’s favor, and for the first time in five years, they could feel secure about their farm. Harry promptly borrowed $600 from Mamma Truman and invested in a 1911 Stafford, an open touring car made in Kansas City. Detroit was not yet the auto capital of America. The Stafford was a spiffy car. New, it sold for over $2,000 - a huge price in 1914. There were ads for lesser cars in the Jackson Examiner for as little as $490, but Harry wanted a car that Bess Wallace would be proud to ride in.

The Stafford made the trip to Independence a lot easier, although for the first few weeks, until Harry mastered his machine, it did not seem that way. Harry had stalls by the dozen and blowouts by the half dozen. At one point, he spent ten minutes cranking the motor and then the handle flew off the crankshaft, spraining his wrist and banging his head against the radiator. “When you have an auto,” Harry remarked, “there is nothing else to cuss about.”

But the car was worth the early pain and suffering. It gave Harry little time for Bess. She occasionally went out with other men in Independence, no doubt among the thinning ranks of bachelors from the old Delaware Street crowd. Bess felt compelled to tell Harry about these dates. She hoped he would not be jealous because there was nothing for him to worry about. She may have told him about the exchange Mary Paxton once had with Elmer Twyman. Mary asked him why so few of them had married within the group. “Maybe we all liked each other too much,” Elmer said.

Harry’s reply made it clear that the essential Harry Truman was emerging from his grief, intact. “You needn’t ever be afraid of my being jealous of your having a good time with some other fellow. . . . It’s my opinion that when people come to the point where they are jealous of each other (which is nothing more nor less than distrust), it is time to quit. I never intend to arrive at that stage myself - i.e., I never intend to quit.”

While Bess and Harry were struggling to be happy in their small private world, history was rumbling in the distance. Although they never mentioned it in their letters, a horrendous war had begun in Europe in August 1914, around the time that John Truman became ill. Germans and Frenchmen and Englishmen and Russians began slaughtering each other by the tens of thousands. It is amazing to read the Jackson Examiner for this period and see how little attention Missouri paid to World War I during these early days. It is barely mentioned at all and never on the front page. For people living in the center of the immense continent of North America, it all seemed far away.

Bess was much more interested in the travails of the Trumans - and the renewed adventures of Mary Paxton, who, after two and a half years in Mississippi, had recovered from her breakdown. On the advice of the dean of the University of Missouri journalism school, Mary took a masters in home economics at the University of Chicago. She got a job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a district home-demonstration agent. Operating from Roanoke, Virginia, she supervised a large staff of county agents who taught farm wives how to run their homes more economically and how to feed their families more nutritiously. It was hard work. She traveled as much as 1,000 miles a week and seldom slept in the same bed more than one night.

During Mary’s absence, Bess had become a good friend of Mary’s younger sister, Libby. Both Paxton girls also had a tender, touching, relationship with Madge Gates Wallace. Apparently, they never stopped yearning for the mother they had lost in 1903, and Mrs. Wallace was a substitute with whom they corresponded and to whom they often sent Christmas presents.

Libby was as independent as - and even more headstrong than - her sister Mary. She, too, wanted a career, and when Mary offered to get her a job as a county agent in Virginia, she leaped at the opportunity. Once there, she discovered she did not like working for her older sister. A battle ensued, which Bess was asked to referee by mail. Bess sided with her fellow older sister. She told Mary that she was “afraid [Libby] thinks she can do as she pleases under you. Yet it’s a question whether anybody else would put up with her.” Libby solved the problem by falling in love and getting married.

Other friends wrote to Bess from California, Illinois, Michigan, and New York. The letters make it clear that she still had her father’s gift for winning people’s affection. She was particularly close to her first cousins, Louise Gates Wells, her Aunt Maud’s daughter, and Helen Wallace, Aunt Myra’s daughter. Myra had married a lawyer in Kansas City named Boulware Wallace, who was not related to the Independence Wallaces. All these women were around the same age, and marriage was on all their minds. One letter, written from Lexington, Kentucky, by a bridge club member, Nelle Rugg, reported that a mutual friend had been asking when Bess and Harry were going to get married. “I told her we hadn’t set the date yet but that he had given you a sparkler for Xmas.”

I fear that Nelle was tippling some Kentucky moonshine when she wrote that one - or teasing the nosy friend. Harry Truman did not have the money to buy a diamond. But everyone was obviously watching and waiting for the sound of wedding bells on North Delaware Street. No one was more eager to hear them than Harry Truman. But first he had to get his hands on some money. For a while, 1915 looked like a promising year. The war in Europe had created thousands of jobs in American factories, and farm prices rose with the booming economy.

But Harry’s hopes were shadowed by the $12,500 debt that he had assumed when he became his father’s partner in J. A. Truman & Son, the company they had formed to run the farm. When his father died, he became responsible for the full amount. Even this sum could be cleared, though, if they “hit” with a bumper harvest. “Things look fine. . . . If the crops only turn out as well as they appear now, there won’t be anything to worry about,” he wrote to Bess in April 1915.

But by July, there was plenty to worry about. This time, instead of a drought, there was its opposite - torrential rains. Ditches and furrows filled with water, making it difficult to cut the wheat. In the moisture, another enemy, the Hessian fly, a tiny parasite that had been ruining wheat since Revolutionary days, flourished. To worsen matters, Missouri’s old rival, Kansas, had perfect weather and a stupendous wheat crop, which drove prices down everywhere. By November, a discouraged Harry Truman was again looking beyond Jackson County’s borders for a rainbow with some gold at the end of it.

He first went to Texas, hoping to find cheaper land where he could expand his chances of making big money fast. He told Bess that he could clear $25,000 in three years and still have enough left over to own a farm worth $150 an acre if he could only persuade his Uncle Harrison to put up the money to get him started. But Uncle Harrison seemed mainly interested in having a good time with his money. For several years, Harry had been dragging him out of half the saloons in Kansas City. Bess, who knew from cruel experience how little confidence anyone can put in an alcoholic’s promises, must have begun to wonder if she would ever become Mrs. Harry Truman.

Making her unhappiness more acute was the marriage of her brother Frank to Natalie Ott in March 1915. George Wallace was close to repeating the performance with May Southern. Nothing could make an older sister more uneasy than the marriage of younger brothers. It gave Bess the distinct feeling that she was on her way to becoming an old maid. There also was her mother, always there to solicit her companionship, to suggest, however subtly, that maybe it did not matter if Harry Truman failed. Without ever quite saying it, Madge Wallace hinted in her oblique way that it might be better for all concerned if Bess lived out her youth as her mother’s companion, endlessly solacing her grief, wordlessly commemorating the tragedy they shared.

The power of Madge’s influence in the family became visible when Frank and George Wallace married. Madge persuaded her father to divide the garden and give her sons two lots on which he built virtually identical bungalows. There, they began their wedded lives, under their mother’s direct observation. They and their wives soon learned that Madge Wallace never went to bed until all the lights in these two houses were out. She never permitted either wife to walk past 219 North Delaware Street without emerging to ask where she was going. It was not done in a tyrannical way or with a nasty tone of voice. Madge Wallace was still a lady. Words of endearment, a gentle smile accompanied the question. But it was clear to both women that their husbands were never going to be permitted to leave their mother’s presence as long as she lived.

If this was how Madge Wallace regarded her sons, it is not hard to imagine the intensity of her attachment to her only daughter. Nor is it hard for me to imagine - because I saw, in later years, the persistence of the antagonism - her dislike of Harry Truman, the farmer who was threatening to take her daughter away from her. That Bess Wallace was able to resist this steady, subtle, but oh-so-powerful opposition to the man she had come to love after so much hesitation is a tribute to her strength of character - and to the power of Harry Truman’s love.

Early in 1916, after he had been informally engaged to Bess for two and a half years, Harry sent her a cry of the heart, if there ever was one.

Nearly every time I see you I want to urge you to throw prudence to the winds and take me anyway just as things are . . . and then I think of all the debts I am saddled with and of my present inability even to buy you a decent ring and I haven’t the nerve to do it.

Then I see myself in an ideal country home with everything as it should be and you to run it and me and it’s almost unbearable to wait. Then I wake up and see our old house going to wreck for want of painting and repairs because I must pay interest on a debt I had no hand in making and my dream has to keep waiting.

He could only beg her “to keep backing me to win through and I will.”

This plea was repeated with varying phrases throughout the rest of 1916. Abandoning Texas and Uncle Harrison, who was rapidly drinking himself into his grave, Harry next tried to strike it rich in a lead-and-zinc mine. His brother Vivian’s father-in-law had made over $100,000 in one of these ventures, and together they talked Harry into investing $11,000 of borrowed money into a mine near Commerce, Oklahoma.

The Truman luck stayed bad. Everything that could possibly go wrong with a mine proceeded to do so. The market price of metals sank, the machinery failed, the workers were unreliable. The men Harry had hired to run the farm in Grandview quit, and he had to rush back and harvest the crops. But Bess refused to lose faith in him. She sent him letters that made him “see rainbows in the darkest kind of sky.” When the mine finally quit for good, he was able to write: “If you still have faith in my poor judgment I can still win.”

Then he added one of those Trumanesque comments on life that had a lot to do with Bess Wallace keeping her faith in him. “You know a man’s judgment is good or bad accordingly as he wins or loses on a proposition. It seems to me that it’s one big guess and the fellow who guesses right is the man of good judgment.”

Absorbed in Harry’s struggle, they still ignored the war in Europe in their letters. By now, it had been raging for almost two years. Even local papers such as the Examiner began carrying stories on it. One Independence resident was serving with the British army and sent letters to friends that were published in the paper. The Kansas City Star and the other city papers covered it even more extensively. But most Missourians shared the opinion of the state’s congressional delegation: The United States should stay out of it. Missouri’s senior senator, William J. Stone, had grown famous for denouncing Woodrow Wilson’s flirtation with intervention on the allied side. Harry Truman’s political hero, William Jennings Bryan, had resigned as secretary of state to protest Wilson’s policies.

Bess and Harry probably discussed the war. All his life, Harry had been fascinated by military history, and he followed the great battles being fought in France, Russia, and Turkey with intense interest. But they had no special enthusiasm for either side. A glimpse of their typically Missourian neutrality emerges from a letter he wrote Bess about her dog.

While he was mining lead and zinc in Oklahoma, he was also raising a greyhound that Bess had acquired somewhere. When he brought him home from the defunct mine, he was calling him Don Juan of Austria, after the hero of the battle of Lepanto. But he remarked that Bess could easily change his name. “If you are an English sympathizer, you could hardly call him anything Austrian. . . . You could call him Kitchen (short for Kitchener) [the English general]. You could even name him Willy [after William Jennings Bryan] and be Democratically right.”

But the drumbeat of history refused to stay out of their lives, no matter what they thought and felt about it. The war dominated the presidential campaign of 1916 in which Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection against Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Wilson won by carrying California by 3,773 votes. The embittered Republican regulars had refused to give the nomination to Theodore Roosevelt, because of his bolt from the party in 1912. Teddy had been calling the president everything from a coward to a hypocrite for what he considered Wilson’s halfhearted support of the Allies. Roosevelt’s abuse stirred a lukewarm sympathy for Wilson in Missouri. But as Harry Truman’s letter casually demonstrated, it was a long way from enthusiastic support.

Meanwhile, Harry went from lead-and-zinc mining into the oil business. His finances had been improved by a sad but not unexpected event, the death of his Uncle Harrison. The old bachelor left his share of the Young farm to Harry, his mother, and sister. With the farm for collateral, Harry was able to raise enough money to go into business with Kansas City attorney Jerry Culbertson (who had been a partner in the zinc mine) and an oil speculator named David H. Morgan, who was sure there were millions to be made from oil beneath the farmlands of Kansas and Oklahoma.

They formed a company and began selling shares of stock. One of the first investors was Bess Wallace. I do not know how much she invested or where she got the money - she may have borrowed it from her grandfather. But it was another example of her faith in Harry Truman. There were plenty of other investors, thanks to the war-stimulated economy. In January 1917, Harry was excitedly reporting to Bess that “the money is coming in by the basketful.”

They were taking in as much as $1,500 a day, and he proudly informed her that her shares now owned a refinery and leases on some 15,000 acres of promising oil land. “Hope to call you and say we’re over the rocks soon,” he wrote. “Here’s wishing you all the happiness on earth and hoping to share it.”

By March 1917, a few weeks after Bess turned thirty-two, their situation looked sufficiently promising to discuss an engagement announcement in the spring and marriage in the fall. Bess excitedly informed her closest friends of the good news. Louise Gates Wells, who was living in New York, replied with a spritely letter to “Dearest Bess(ie).” She was “delighted to hear that you were thinking of matrimony in a most serious fashion.” In her opinion, “Cousin Harry . . . is about the luckiest chap alive, not because of his investment prospects but the other prospects.” Another friend, Catherine Woodson, sent her congratulations and remarked that if she were a man, Harry would have had her as a rival. Mary Paxton was less ebullient but more intimate. “I was surprised,” she wrote. “I don’t believe your mother will ever be used to doing without you.”

Another comment in Mary’s letter makes it even clearer that Bess was planning to leave 219 North Delaware Street. “I know you will love living on the farm,” Mary wrote. “I expect to have a farm some day, but I don’t know whether I will buy one or marry one.” These words clarify a passing comment that Harry Truman made around this time. He said he yearned “to build me a bungalow.” He was obviously going to build a separate house on the Grandview farm and commute to Kansas City to help run the Morgan Oil Company. This made good sense. A man was needed on the farm to make sure the hired hands did their jobs.

But the drumbeat of history was booming louder in the lives of Harry Truman and Bess Wallace as these joyous hopes were rising. Although Woodrow Wilson had been reelected on the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” he took an increasingly confrontational position against the Central Powers, Austria and Germany. He began expanding the army and navy. Shortly before his second inauguration, he made it clear that if Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare and sank American merchant ships, the United States would declare war. Germany promptly announced it was going to do exactly that and gamble on bringing the Allies to their knees before America could organize an army large enough to make a difference.

Woodrow Wilson sent a declaration of war to Congress on April 2, 1917. One of Missouri’s senators and four of her congressmen voted against it, but that was irrelevant as far as Harry Truman and Bess Wallace were concerned. Almost instantly, the value of the stock in the Morgan Oil Company sank to zero. There was no manpower available to sink wells on the land they had leased, and the stream of money from investors dried up. Harry Truman was devastated.

I seem to have a grand and admirable ability for calling tails when heads come up. My luck should surely change. Sometime I should win. I have tried to stick. Worked, really did, like thunder for ten years to get that old farm in line for some big production. Have it in shape and have a crop failure every year. Thought I’d change my luck, got a mine, and see what I did get. Tried again in the other long chance, oil. Still have high hopes on that, but then I’m naturally a hopeful happy person, one of the “Books in brooks, Tongues in trees and Good in everything” sort of guy. . . . I was very impressionable when I was a kid and I believed all the Sunday school books and idealist dope we were taught and it’s taken me twenty odd years to find out that Mark [Twain] is right when he says that the boy who stole the jam and lied about it and killed the cat and sassed his ma, grew up and became a highly honored citizen. . . . The poor gink who stands around and waits for someone to find out his real worth just naturally continues to stand, but the gink who toots his horn and tells ‘em how good he is makes ‘em believe it when they know he’s a bluff and would steal from his grandma.

I don’t believe that. I’m just feeling that way now. If I can’t win straight, I’ll continue to lose. I’m the luckiest guy in the world to have you to love and to know that when I’ve arrived at a sensible solution to these direful financial difficulties I’ve gotten into, that I’ll have the finest, best-looking, and all the other adjectives in the superlative girl in the world to make the happiest home in the world with. Now isn’t that a real heaven on earth to contemplate? I think it is and I know I’ll have just that in the not far off future, unless it is necessary for me to get myself shot in this war - and then I’ll find you somewhere. I dreamt that you and I were living in Rome when togas were the fashion. I am always dreaming of you. I’m never anywhere in a dream or out of it that I don’t imagine you there too. Last night I thought I was in an airplane in France. I fell about 17,000 feet and didn’t get much hurt and I was idiot enough to weep because I couldn’t see you in the hospital. It seemed that you were outside and they wouldn’t let you in. Some dream, what? (I had a cheese omlet for supper.) I’m going to eat one every night.

Those comments about the war warned Bess Wallace that Harry Truman was finding it difficult to ignore the appeals to patriotism and courage that President Woodrow Wilson was issuing in Washington. Years later, Harry recalled that he was “stirred heart and soul” by these war messages. Bess soon was dismayed to learn that Harry had rejoined the Missouri National Guard. (He had let his original enlistment lapse in 1911.) He threw himself into the local effort to expand Kansas City’s Battery B and Independence’s Battery C into a regiment. As a former member of the guard, he was suited to this task. He recruited so many men that he was elected a first lieutenant of a new Battery, F.

Although Frank and George Wallace were both younger than thirty-three-year-old Harry Truman, neither enlisted. I am certain that their mother was the reason. A woman who would not permit married sons to move off her family’s property could not bear the thought of them going to war in distant France. Bess struggled to support Harry’s decision, but it was hard to accept. Madge Wallace undoubtedly used all her mournful guile to make him look uncaring and indifferent.

For a month, Bess managed to control a dangerous mixture of anger and disappointment. She told herself that there were millions of other women in America going through the same experience, but she had waited so long and marriage had seemed so certain. In six months, she would be thirty-three years old. Many people were predicting the war would last at least four years. She might be too old to have a child when Harry Truman came back - if he came back.

She tried to conceal her feelings from Harry, but they burst out one night in July. A week later he wrote to her, admitting that he had “felt like a dog” for the past seven days. “It seems I have caused you to be unhappy by my overenthusiastic action in getting myself sent to war.” Another woman about whom he cared deeply had had a similar reaction: “Two big tears came in Mamma’s eyes last night when I started off to Lodge in my soldier clothes. You are the two people in the world I would rather see smile and that I like to cause to smile and here I’ve gone done the opposite to both of you. Perhaps I can make you all happier for it. I’ll try my best. Some way I seem to have an ability for getting myself into things by my overzealous conduct or anxiety to see them a success and do not see the consequences for myself or others until the conclusion comes.”

For a while, Harry tried to disguise the seriousness of his decision. He told Bess that it was not yet certain that all the National Guard units would be incorporated in the new U.S. Army immediately. They might not have room for them and the hundreds of thousands of men the government was drafting. His bad eyes might keep him out of combat. The Russians, who had had a democratic revolution and kicked out the Czar, were launching a massive offensive that might win the war in a month or two.

Harry must have known he was trying to avoid the moment of truth. He was already in uniform, living in a tent city opposite the Kansas City Convention Hall. On August 11, 1917, he could no longer disguise his commitment. “I have some news for you that perhaps you won’t consider good,” he wrote. “The Federal Mustering Officer passed me into the service of the United States today. I am accepted and have to go. I will have to confess that I am not very sorry, because I have been crazy to be a military man almost since I can remember.”

It is a sad letter. I found my eyes filling with tears as I read it. I am sure Bess wept far more copious tears. “I wish I was in your backyard,” Lieutenant Truman blurts at one point. Then he writes a whole paragraph full of pride about the way he has learned to drill the battery. Although Harry Truman joked about letting her “run him,” Bess was discovering that she was in love with a man who could insist on doing things his way.

In spite of her turmoil, Bess remained committed to Harry. Early in that history-filled summer of 1917, she asked her mother to announce her engagement. A long, subterranean struggle came to a climax in this encounter. In many ways, the situation, the nation at war and Harry Truman, still far from a financial success, embroiled in it against her deepest wishes, made Bess more vulnerable. But it also made her decision more formidable, more final. She was not doing this because Harry Truman finally had made some money or had pleased her in some other extraordinary way. She was doing it even though he had displeased her. She was doing it because she loved him.

Bess handed her mother a piece of paper she had picked up when she went to visit Harry in Kansas City. It was the instruction page for a form that women filled out to register for war service. On the back, the following words were written in Harry Truman’s bold scrawl: “Mrs. David W. Wallace of Independence announces the engagement of her daughter, Elizabeth Virginia, to Lieutenant Harry S. Truman of the Second Missouri Field Artillery.” Sixty-five years later, I found that piece of paper in the attic at 219 North Delaware Street. Bess knew that it was one of the most important documents in her life.