Bess Truman (54 page)

All this unpleasantness only made Mother realize that Dad was right; they would be miserable living in Washington, D.C., with this sort of president in the White House.

If the Republicans had hoped to end the Truman presidency on the sourest possible note, they failed. There were still a lot of people in Washington who remembered the good and the great days of the past eight years. They swarmed into Union Station to give the Trumans the most amazing send-off any outgoing presidential couple ever got from the jaded, jaundiced reporters and politicians of the District of Columbia.

You could have sworn that they had overheard Bess Truman’s acid comments about the forlorn little band who saw the Trumans off on the final whistle-stop tour in the fall of 1948 and were determined to erase that bitter memory. You could almost think, if you were in a positive frame of mind, that they were trying to prove that Washingtonians could, once every century or so, see beyond winning and losing elections to such human values as integrity and courage and kindness.

Never mind my sarcasm. Dad loved the send-off - and Mother loved it even more. It was the tribute she felt Dad deserved; the one that seemed to have eluded him in the bitterness and frustration of the losing campaign.

The trip home almost turned into a whistle-stop tour. In town after town through West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, delegations of Democrats came down to the train to pay homage to the Trumans. As a result, the train was an hour late when they pulled into the familiar Missouri Pacific depot at Independence at 8:30 on the night of January 21, 1953. There they got the warmest tribute yet. The Kansas City American Legion Band was blasting out “The Missouri Waltz” and a crowd of at least 10,000 people roared welcome home. Dad’s voice was choked with emotion as he thanked them. Another 1,500 people waited in the streets around 219 North Delaware Street to repeat the welcome in a more neighborly accent. “This is the climax,” Dad said.

A week later, as they settled into being private citizens again, Dad wrote a letter to one of his old Washington friends, revealing how Mother felt about this triumphant homeward journey. “Bess and I were talking of our thirty years experience in elective office, our trials and tribulations, our ups and downs and she remarked that our send-off from Washington and our reception at home and along the way made it all worthwhile.”

One of the first things Mother had said she planned to do when she returned home was take down the iron fence that the Secret Service had put up around 219 North Delaware Street. The Trumans were not in residence long before she saw that this was not a good idea. At least 5,000 people a week walked or drove past the house. The fence was the main protection from souvenir hunters, who would have stolen every flower in the gardens and pried every clapboard off the first floor.

The Secret Service had said goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Truman in Union Station in Washington, D.C. At that time, the United States did not give much thought to the welfare of its ex-presidents. The town of Independence contributed a lone policeman, but he could not be on duty all day and all night.

There was someone peering at Mother and Dad every time they came out the front door. Sometimes they did more than peer. While I was home for a visit, a man stood at the gate looking and acting strange. The local policeman was nowhere to be seen. I came out on the porch and yelled, “Go away.” When he did not depart, Mother called the police. They took him into custody and found out he was an escaped mental patient carrying a loaded .45 pistol.

Dad did not let this incident deter him from strolling around his home town. One of his diary notes from the spring of 1953 gives a good picture of him “at large.”

With no pension from his grateful (that’s sarcasm) country, Dad might have been justified in taking one of the hundreds of lucrative job offers that were showered on him during these first months of retirement. But he steadfastly maintained that he was not going to sell the prestige of the presidency to anybody, no matter how high the bids went. If he made any money, he would do it by the sweat of his brow and brain, writing his memoirs. Mother, ever practical, decided this meant they had better economize and that henceforth the ex-president would cut the grass at 219 North Delaware Street.

Dad just smiled and said he would get around to it as soon as possible. The grass continued to grow. Mother began wondering aloud what the neighbors thought of the lawn. If the grass got any higher, it would look as if Harry Truman had gone back to farming and was raising a wheat crop in the front yard. (You can see where I got my sarcastic streak.) Mother seemed to have forgotten she was dealing with a man who had outwitted Stalin and Churchill and de Gaulle, not to mention Franklin Roosevelt and Jimmy Byrnes when they tried to order him around.

One Sunday morning, as Mother was getting ready for church, she heard the brisk rattle of a lawn mower beneath her window. She looked out and saw the ex-president cutting the grass and cheerfully greeting neighbors who were on their way to church. It was pretty obvious to the whole town that its most famous citizen was skipping divine services that morning.

From a religious point of view, this did not bother Mother in the least. But she believed in keeping up appearances - especially in Independence. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked her Sunday grass cutter.

“What you asked me to do,” Dad said, with a fiendishly innocent smile.

The next day, Mother hired a man to mow the lawn.

The biggest problem the former first couple encountered in their first year of retirement was the mail. A literal avalanche of letters, some 70,000, arrived in their first two weeks in Missouri. It was obviously impossible to deal with this problem at home, and Dad set up an office in Kansas City and hired a staff to get things organized. Meanwhile, Bess had some organizing of her own to do. On January 27, a tractor trailer and an army truck deposited my grand piano and all my White House furniture, plus boxes full of mementos, gifts from heads of state, her official papers, making an obstacle course out of the interior of 219 North Delaware. Almost the same day, Mother had a carpenter at work inside the house, making the attic airtight so she could store some of these things up there. She also had storage closets built for her White House wardrobe, which was much too extensive for Independence.

Dad was soon commuting to Kansas City every day, like a regular working man. Retirement was simply not in his vocabulary. Aside from that, he had some work to do. He needed to organize his papers to write his memoirs, whereby to skewer a few Republicans and leave a record for historians to ponder. He was also anxious to get to work on deciding where and how to build the Harry S. Truman Library to store the 3.5 million official documents from his administration.

That left Mother at home staring at unpacked crates and more furniture than she knew what to do with. “I don’t think we’ll ever get straightened out in this house,” she told Mary Paxton Keeley early in February. To complicate matters, the arthritis in her hands suddenly worsened. In a March letter to Mary Paxton Keeley, she admitted: “[I] am somewhat handicapped in doing things with my hands.”

Fortunately, Vietta Garr was on hand to do the cooking -Mother never did acquire any enthusiasm for that line of work. She promptly rejoined the Bridge Club, of course, but that only met once a week. That left her alone a lot of the time in 219 North Delaware. It was an eerie experience. For the first time in the fifty years she had spent in that house, her mother was no longer there. It was this mixture of loneliness and boredom that turned my stay-at-home mother into a world-class traveler.

She took Dad by complete surprise with the announcement that she thought it would be a good idea to accept oilman Ed Pauley’s invitation to vacation on his estate on Coconut Island in Hawaii. She maneuvered me into joining them for this trip. “I hate leaving the house looking as it does,” she told Mary Paxton Keeley, as a gesture of appeasement to her housewife’s conscience. In other eras, that would have been a prelude to not leaving it. But this time she left it without a qualm, as far as I could see.

It was one of the best vacations we ever had. We started off in a style that we never achieved before (or since). Averell Harriman loaned us his private railroad car. It had everything from a chef to a wood-burning fireplace. To keep the flying to a minimum - or maybe to stretch out the vacation - Mother insisted on going by ship from California. Hawaii was at its lushest. We drove to Honolulu through the Pali Pass with Mother exclaiming at the beauty of the tropical flowers. We all oohed and aahed at the spectacular view from the Pali Lookout. Mostly we lazed on the beach, and Mother did a little fishing with her partner, who kept feeling sorry for the fish, as usual. Mother went right on hauling them in, also as usual.

Dad kept a diary for part of the trip, which included an expedition to the “Big Island” of Hawaii. Notice his fascination with the new facts he was learning. At the age of sixty-nine, he still found the world a fascinating place.

With his usual confidence in his indestructibility, Dad was un-bothered by that harrowing takeoff. Mother was terrified, but she did not show it. She had decided that if the Trumans were going to keep traveling, she had to overcome her fear of flying. With some help from her remarkable will power, she soon had it licked. That trip to Hawaii was only the beginning of the Trumans’ trips, almost all by air.

In the summer of 1953, they went to Washington by car. The motive was nostalgia, not fear of flying. “Isn’t it great to be on our own again, doing as we please as we did in the old Senate days?” Mother said as they rolled along.

They stopped for lunch in Hannibal, Missouri, and were promptly recognized by a couple of former county judges. Every waitress and all the customers in the restaurant had to shake hands and get autographs. In Decatur, Illinois they asked a gas station attendant for directions to a good motel. He recognized them and notified the chief of police and everyone else in town. They were soon being guarded by two detectives and four policemen, with whom, out of politeness, they had to have supper.

In Pennsylvania, a state trooper pulled them over, not because they were speeding, but because he wanted to shake hands. The newspapers promptly reported Harry Truman had gotten a ticket. Telling all this to a friend from Arizona, who had invited them for a visit, Dad concluded he and Mother could not go anywhere as just plain folks “until the glamour wears off.”

Speaking of cars, since Mother would not let him or anyone else, including her daughter, drive her Chrysler, Dad bought himself a two-tone-green Dodge coupe. One day, he tried to negotiate the narrow back gate of the house and scraped all the chrome off it. Mother was triumphant. That proved her contention that he was not qualified to drive her car.

About two weeks later, Dad got a call at the office. It was Mother, sounding glum. “I missed the turn at that darn gate and scraped all the chrome off my Chrysler,” she said. I would never have let her forget it. But Dad just dropped the subject.

The Trumans had a wonderful time in Washington that summer, getting the lowdown on President Ike’s headaches with Senator McCarthy and other political problems, foreign and domestic. But they came away still convinced that they could not spend as much time in the capital as they would have preferred. A few years later, in an interview in
This Week
, Mother said that ideally, she would have liked to spend six months in Washington and six months in Independence each year.