II
With the task of the memoirs that he had been putting off finally under way, and with his efforts to launch the library, Truman found himself more occupied than he had ever anticipated. “The book is doing fine but what a slave it’s made of me,” he would report to Dean Acheson in the fall.
Of all the presidents until then, only Herbert Hoover had written his own story in his lifetime. (“How much is lost to us because so few Presidents have told their own stories,” Truman was to say in the preface to his own work.) John Quincy Adams and James K. Polk had written extensively about their time in office, but in their private diaries. Ulysses S. Grant, dying of cancer, had spent his final days laboring heroically on his memoirs as a means to provide financial security for his family, but Grant chose not to include his shadowed years in the White House. Even Theodore Roosevelt, with his sense of history and of his own importance to history, was oddly superficial when describing his presidency in his popular autobiography. Nor had Herbert Hoover, in telling his story, been obliged to recount anything approaching the world-shaking tumult, the watershed history, of the Truman years. The closest thing to what Truman would be attempting was Winston Churchill’s magisterial history of World War II, which had also appeared first in Life, and against which, as Truman knew, whatever he produced was bound to be compared.
“I’m not a writer!” those working with him on the project were to hear him say many times. He was not after their sympathy, only stating what he saw as the heart of the problem. Before the task was finished a full dozen people would be involved.
The first called in to help were William Hillman and David Noyes, both of whom had served on the White House staff as speechwriters and whose loyalty to Truman verged on adoration. Hillman, a hulking veteran newspaper correspondent, had already published a eulogizing Truman portrait called Mr. President, a book of photographs with text compiled mainly from Truman quotes and selections from his private papers. Noyes was in advertising in California, a short, wiry, talkative man, who had worked on the 1948 campaign and was best known for initiating the controversial scheme to send Chief Justice Vinson to Moscow. His claim to have been one of Truman’s key advisers was greatly exaggerated.
Promising to “protect” Truman from the publisher, Hillman and Noyes set up a working procedure for the memoirs. They offered advice and they came and went, flying in and out of Kansas City, as need be, every month or so, while a paid staff of three was established in Room 1002, on the floor below Truman at the Federal Reserve Bank Building. The plan was for Truman to “talk” the book. For months, he talked to a recording machine supplied by Life—a device he hated—responding to questions put to him by the hour by a University of Southern California professor of journalism named Robert E. G. Harris. Meantime, two young research assistants checked all that Truman said against what was in the files. By late fall, more than 100,000 words had been transcribed, all beautifully typed and arranged in looseleaf notebooks. But there was very little in the way of an actual manuscript, and what Truman saw of this, he didn’t like. “Good God, what crap!” he scrawled across the top.
Professor Harris was dismissed, his place taken by another academic scholar, Morton Royce, a highly disorganized, excessively profane man, who continued on with the interviews, but ever so slowly, pressing Truman over and over for more complete and detailed answers, often returning to the same questions several times, and particularly about the atomic bomb. As a consequence, Truman grew extremely annoyed with Royce and the whole process.
The editor of Life, Ed Thompson, flew in from New York for a first look early in 1954. Truman had agreed to deliver 300,000 words by June 30, 1955. As it was, perhaps thirty-five pages of manuscript were ready. The raw material, Truman’s own recollections, Thompson thought “lively” and “honest.” But far greater progress was needed, and soon.
Morton Royce departed and two new writers were taken on, young Herbert Lee Williams, a doctoral candidate from the University of Missouri, and Francis H. Heller, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kansas.
Williams would remember being astonished by the volume of official and private papers at hand:
The cream of the White House communications mix from 1945 to 1952 had been systematically ladled into 50 large metal file cabinets which now lined the walls of the eleventh-floor suite, Truman’s offices [upstairs]. In these were all of the personal and official correspondence of the President: transcripts of 2,003 public speeches and 324 press conferences; a multitude of inter-office memoranda and directives; minutes of countless executive sessions; copies of more than 31,000 dictated letters, plus handwritten notes to Mamma or sister Mary….
The first bundle of files I was given, to take down to 1002 where I was to digest the contents and regurgitate them in memoirs form, covered the entire lend-lease story, from the time that Truman inherited it from FDR….
Entering Truman’s office one morning in search of a reference book, Williams was also astonished to find the former President fixing himself a drink. (As Williams strongly disapproved of drinking, he would, as time went on, decline invitations to join Truman for lunch, which customarily began with “a little H2O flavored with bourbon,” as Truman would say.)
As manuscript chapters began to emerge, they were reviewed page by page during lengthy sessions in Truman’s office, a good-sized room comfortably furnished with leather chairs, a flag, portraits of Jackson and Jefferson, and books across one wall. The windows faced west over a panoramic view of the city and the distant hills of Kansas. As someone on the staff read aloud, Truman would sit listening intently. “His approval or criticism was solicited almost paragraph by paragraph. The whole idea was to jog the memory of the man who had been there, to add the auto to the biography,” Williams would recall in an article somewhat vainly and inaccurately titled, “I Was Truman’s Ghost.” In fact, he was only a minor ghost among the several enlisted, and his participation was to be relatively brief.
As time went on, various members of Truman’s White House staff, as well as Dean Acheson, John Snyder, General Bradley, and others of Truman’s Cabinet would come to Kansas City to take part in these review sessions.
The man who had been rising early and going off to work every morning most of his long life had by now settled again into the old pattern. At the house on North Delaware the lights started coming on well before dawn, usually at 5:30, at the sound of the courthouse clock. His morning paper, the Kansas City Times, arrived shortly afterward, tossed over the iron fence from a passing car, and he would unlatch the front door and come down the porch steps in his shirtsleeves to retrieve the paper from the front walk.
About seven he would emerge again from the front door, in suit jacket and hat now, a walking cane in hand. He would go out the front gate—in turn unlocking, closing, and checking to see it was secure—then start off on his walk, a half hour tour that took him through the same neighborhoods, over much the same ground in memory, that he was covering in the memoirs. Across the street still was the little Victorian Noland house, occupied still by his Noland cousins, Ethel and Nellie. Rounding the corner from North Delaware, left onto Maple and heading east, “uptown” to the Square, he would pass the red-brick First Presbyterian Church where he and Bess had met in Sunday School. (She had golden curls and has, to this day, the most beautiful eyes, he was saying in the memoirs.) At the Square, Clinton’s drugstore was now Helzberg Jewelers, but looked not greatly different from when he had worked there so diligently as a boy (…mopping the floors, sweeping the sidewalk, and having everything shipshape when Mr. Clinton came in).
The courthouse, the “new” courthouse as his generation still called it, his courthouse, held sway over the Square no less than ever, its white cupola catching the morning sun ahead of the rest of the town. Tourists would ask which was his office, which were his windows. (The judges of these Missouri county courts are not judges in the usual sense, since the court is an administrative, not a judicial body….)
The town had greatly changed in the two decades since he had first gone to Washington. The town was still changing, growing. New sections of new houses seemed to spring up overnight. Traffic was heavier. The population was now past 40,000, more than five times what it had been when he was a boy. More and more, Independence was becoming a suburb of Kansas City. Yet the old part of town, the Square, the neighborhoods of his boyhood looked much like they always had, and he felt great affection for all of it.
Others who were up and about early often made an effort to say hello, to introduce themselves and shake his hand as he came down the sidewalk at his steady clip. “I always try to be as pleasant as I can,” he wrote in his diary. “They, of course, don’t know that I walk early to get a chance to think over things and get ready for work of the day.” If he didn’t know them, he usually knew something about someone they were related to or descended from, and these recollections always pleased him.
“Well, I went to Maple Ave., turned left ‘toward town’ and spoke to several people, turned south on Pleasant Street,” continues the diary account of one such morning.
After I’d passed the light at Lexington I met a young man, Frank A. Reynolds, who introduced himself as John Strother’s son-in-law. We talked a few minutes and I thought of the Strother family—one of the best old families in the County.
John was Democratic Committeeman from Blue Township (Independence) from the time I was road overseer in Washington Township until I went to Washington as U.S. Senator from Missouri. He was a grand man—but wouldn’t tell his age! He was my father’s generation and he always wanted to be young with the young men. He was a good lawyer and an honest one too.
Just as I started to leave Mr. Strother’s son-in-law—and there were other great Strothers: Sam, who was a pillar of the Democratic Party in Kansas City; a second generation Judge, Duvall, and many others—as I say, just as I started to walk again a car stopped across the street and the man jumped out and came over to shake hands and said, “I’m sure you can’t remember me—it’s been so long since you’ve seen me.” I did though. I told him whose son he is and who his grandfather was! Some feat for a man who has met millions of people.
He belonged to the Pugh family. His grandfather, Noah E. Pugh, was one fine man. He came out to Missouri in 1894 or 1895 and settled on my mother’s part of her father’s estate, 160 acres south east of the farm about three miles. Mr. Pugh had several sons and daughters older and younger than I. Conley Pugh was a few years older than I and was married to a nice Grandview girl when they were very young. It was a happy marriage and the man who stopped me is Conley’s oldest boy. He told me he had four children. It is remarkable indeed how time flies and makes you an old man whether you want to be or not.
His mother had never looked back, always forward, he liked to remind himself. It was part of her strength. With the work on his memoirs, and these daily tours through the old neighborhoods now after so many years, he was thinking more than ever of both parents.
He varied his route one day to another, but it hardly mattered. Whichever way he went was a walk through the past. The boyhood home at River and Waldo was still standing, as was the old house on South Crysler, near the depot. (When we moved to Independence in December 1890, my father bought a big house on South Crysler Street with several acres of land….)
There was to be only one chapter about his early life, taking him from boyhood to his return from France in 1919. But it was a part of the story only he could tell, for which there were no file drawers to search, and the words would be his.
(In the fall of 1892 Grover Cleveland was re-elected over Benjamin Harrison, who had defeated him in 1888. My father was very much elated by Cleveland’s victory. He rode a beautiful gray horse in the torchlight parade and decorated the weather vane on the tower at the north-east corner of the house with a flag and bunting. The weather vane was a beautiful gilded rooster.)
Once at the White House, a magazine writer had remarked to him that his father had been a failure. How could he be called a failure, he had answered, if his son became President of the United States.
During the half hour or so that he was gone from the house, at about 7:15, Vietta Garr would arrive by taxi at the side gate to begin fixing breakfast. The schedule rarely varied. He would return through the front gate at 7:30, not to reemerge until roughly 8:15, but from the back porch this time and carrying an aluminum briefcase, with the manuscript pages he had brought home the night before. He would head for the garage. Then the two-tone green Dodge would be seen backing cautiously out the driveway and off he would go, west down Truman Road, the Kansas City skyline dead ahead and on sunny mornings shining like an artist’s picture of America on the rise.
His regular parking space was in an open lot a block from the office. He would pay a dollar in advance and walk to the bank building. Entering in the lobby, he would tip his hat to the elevator operator, Kay Walker, and greet her by name. By 8:45, he was at his desk.
“I have been working on the opening chapter of my purported memoirs,” Truman wrote to Dean Acheson from the office on January 28, 1954, trying to get to the bottom of why he found the task so very difficult.
I have tried to place myself back into the position I was on April 12, 1945. I have read letters to my mother and sister, to my brother and cousins. I have read telegrams to and from Churchill and Roosevelt, to and from Stalin and Roosevelt. I’ve read memos I made of visits to the White House from April 12th back to July 1944. I’ve read Ike’s, Leahy’s, Churchill’s, Grew’s, Cordell Hull’s books. Memos from Hopkins, Stimson, Assist. and Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson; reports from Marshall, Eisenhower, King, Bradley. Communiqués of Teheran, Cairo, Casablanca, Quebec, Yalta, Byrnes’ book on it, etc., etc. ad lib and still I am living today….
So you see the past has always interested me for use in the present and I am bored to death with what I did and didn’t do nine years ago.
But Andrew Johnson, James Madison, even old Rutherford B. Hayes I’m extremely interested in as I am [in] King Henry IV of France, Margaret of Navarre, Charles V and Philip II of Spain and Charlie’s Aunt Margaret.
Wish to goodness I’d decided to spend my so called retirement putting Louis XIII, Gustavus Adolphus, Richelieu and five tubs of gold together instead of writing about me and my mistakes….
On St. Patrick’s Day, he wrote again to tell Acheson he was thinking still about the relationship between history and government. “Our tribal instinct has not been eliminated by science and invention. We, as individuals, haven’t caught up physically or ethically with the atomic age. Will we?”
Perhaps their grandchildren would do better, though, he added, in his case this remained a hypothetical statement. (Margaret as yet had shown no signs of getting married.)
He sensed a change in how the country regarded him and was heartened by it. “The tone of my mail has changed completely. It still comes in by the bushel but there’s hardly a mean one in two hundred….”
The increase in interest and appreciation at home in Independence was even more striking. Automobiles and sightseeing buses now cruised slowly by on North Delaware nearly all day. When Bess sent some of his clothes to her church rummage sale, word spread that one item, an overcoat, had been worn at Potsdam—a silly claim since the meeting at Potsdam had taken place in midsummer, but the coat brought a big price just the same. A sign at the depot now proclaimed: “Independence, the Home of Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States”—a sign that annoyed Truman, who, with his concern for historical accuracy, insisted he was the thirty-second president since Cleveland served twice.
Some people in town, mainly among Republicans, thought no better of him than they had before. But they were a decided minority. By strong consensus the town thought it wonderful that the Trumans were home to stay. People liked the way they had both stepped modestly back into the life of the town, and especially the way “Mr. Truman” conducted himself, as a fellow citizen. They were as proud of him for his lack of side, his fundamental small-town genuineness after all, as they were of anything about him. “I used to say that Harry Truman lived around the corner from me,” his old friend and ardent Republican, Henry Bundschu, told a magazine writer from the East, “now there isn’t a day goes by that I don’t tell myself that you live around the corner from Harry Truman and don’t you forget it.”
Largest and most generous of the town’s gestures, and much the most appreciated by Truman, was the donation of a town park north of the Square as a site for his library. He could not have been more pleased. Independence would be a far more appropriate location than Grandview and more accessible. Slover Park, a quiet, picturesque 13-acre knoll, was just beyond U.S. Highway 24. To have turned over a comparable portion of the Grandview farm, furthermore, would have meant a major financial sacrifice not only for Truman, but Vivian and Mary Jane, for the land at Grandview was becoming more valuable all the time. Also, the Independence site was only a mile from 219 North Delaware, nothing at all for a good walker.
“All partisanship and selfishness were left behind months ago and this home city of this world-famous statesman is the most logical place to establish such a national Shrine as the Harry S. Truman Library,” wrote the Kansas City Times.
Besides the work on the memoirs, Truman threw himself into raising money for the library, attending dinners, making speeches around the country, and writing thouands of letters. A fund-raising auction for the library at the National Guard Armory in Independence went on for seven hours. The government in Washington was to contribute nothing to the cost of creating the library. He would raise all the money himself. It was another campaign for him, and in a year and a half he would build a fund of more than $1 million. “The pace he set absolutely terrified me,” Margaret would remember.
Past the age of seventy, Truman often said, one was living on borrowed time. Yet in the spring of 1954, turning seventy, he gave no sign of exerting or enjoying himself any less than ever. He was putting in seventeen hours a day on the book, the mail, and seeing the “customers” who came by the office, he reported to Acheson on May 28, Nor was that all on his mind:
I’m worried about our world situation. We are losing all our friends, the smart but inexperienced boys at the White House are upsetting NATO and throwing our military strength away. Yet they seem to want to intervene in Indo-China….
In June, when the Irving Berlin hit musical Call Me Madam, about Perle Mesta, came to Kansas City’s outdoor theater, Truman happily agreed to make a surprise appearance in the last act, playing the part of himself. Waiting backstage, the night of June 18, he was suddenly ill with violent pains in his stomach. Bess rushed him home and the lights were on at the house all night. On June 20, in an emergency operation at Research Hospital, he had his gallbladder and appendix removed by Wallace Graham, who, since leaving the White House, had resettled in Kansas City to practice surgery. Infection set in. Graham grimly reported that, due to an “unusual hypersensitivity” to modern drugs, the former President was in serious condition. For several days there was extreme concern. It was “a hell of a time,” Truman later said. “They gave me about five or ten gallons of antibiotics by sticking needles in veins. But they just couldn’t kill me.”
But the crisis passed and Truman, improving rapidly, was the model patient. Nothing seemed to bother him. Western Missouri was in the grip of a fierce heat wave. By midday thermometers outside the hospital windows ranged between 110 and 114 degrees and the hospital had no air conditioning. Nevertheless, he was content. When the director of the hospital insisted on putting an air conditioner in his room, he refused. He wanted no special treatment. It was only after Tom Evans pointed out that Bess, who had been sitting with him day after day, was suffering from heat if he wasn’t, that Truman sent for the director and had the air conditioning installed immediately.
“When the papers tell us that you had a gangrenous gall bladder,” wrote Acheson, “I was at once prepared to tell Doc Graham how you got it. It comes from reading the newspapers. No one can escape some malady from this cause. With me it has taken the form of an attack of gout….”
For Truman’s convalescence, Acheson sent a copy of The Reason Why, Cecil Woodham-Smith’s account of the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade. “When you get acquainted with Lords Raglan, Cardigan and Lucan you will be reminded of a certain General we know,” Acheson said, meaning MacArthur.
To Bess, Acheson wrote, “It is touching the way so many people—elevator boys, our cook, taxi drivers, people on the street—keep asking me about the President. He is deeply loved—even by the press.”
More than a hundred thousand cards and letters poured in to Truman, wishing him a speedy recovery, and enough flowers, as he said, “to supply every customer” in the hospital.
From his hospital room on July 6, he pledged to do “everything possible” to get his library started and finished as soon as possible. Once released from the hospital, he was immediately back at work.
Ed Thompson flew in from New York in November to find that the “raw material” of the memoirs had grown beyond limits, yet the manuscript was still far from ready. Tactfully he proposed to the former President that one of Life’s best staff writers, Ernest Havemann, be sent in to do some reshaping and polishing. But Truman declined. “More important to me,” he wrote to Thompson, “especially at this stage, than style or organization of the material are the facts…so that the record of the years of my Presidency may be correct. Until this part of the job is completed I would like you to hold up sending Mr. Havemann; or anyone else….”
Havemann’s turn came three or four weeks later, and for the first time, Truman had an experienced writer working with him. Francis Heller would recall how much he himself learned from Havemann—though Havemann did no actual writing—and how hard everyone worked, six, sometimes seven days a week, “going great guns,” as Truman said. “The damned thing is turning out much better than I thought it would,” he reported to Acheson. But apparently Havemann found the former President a difficult collaborator, and the staff even more troublesome to work with. After a month, he asked to be relieved.
Another writer, Hawthorne Daniel, was recruited, now at the request of Doubleday, the publisher that would be bringing out the book, once Life had launched its installments. Eventually, too, Doubleday’s editor-in-chief Ken McCormick would take part in the cutting and refining, and both Dean Acheson and Sam Rosenman would be asked by Truman to go over the whole “accumulation.” Acheson’s comments were to be of particular value.
The material is more interesting and gripping when you are talking about your own life and your own ideas than it is when you are giving lists of callers at the White House and the activities of the Truman Committee which do not reveal much about you as a man [Acheson advised in one extended critique].
Page 114, line 3. You use the cliché, “striped pants boys in the State Department.” I should like to see you change this to “people in the State Department,” not merely because the phrase is tiresome, but because it gives quite a wrong impression of the tremendous support which you gave to the career service and for which they will be forever grateful.
In places, as he told Truman, Acheson found the manuscript brusque, didactic, and superficial, “quite contrary to what you are.”
Acheson’s lengthy, single-space typed comments, running to many pages, would be gone over closely by the staff, who, in turn, would give Truman their own lengthy comments on Acheson’s comments.
Ken McCormick sensed that Bess Truman was also playing more of a role than met the eye, since Truman seemed to make better decisions about the manuscript, seemed to improve in his judgments, after having talked with her at home in the evenings. “She was his true North, I think,” McCormick said years later, remembering how the work had gone.
The financial burden of all this for Truman was mounting, for as yet he had received no money. The first payment of his $600,000 from Life was not due until June 30, when he was supposed to deliver the finished manuscript.
By early 1955, the manuscript had grown to approximately 2 million words, whereas the contract had called for only 300,000. After some negotiations, Life agreed to accept 580,000 words, but still the project was behind schedule. Hillman and Noyes now spent more time in Kansas City, cutting and trimming.
Doubleday, faced with the size of the manuscript, decided to bring the memoirs out in two volumes, and so through the first six months of 1955, all concentration was on finishing up Volume One—dealing with only the first sixteen months of the presidency, plus the one chapter on his early life and two others covering the political career prior to Roosevelt’s death.
Things were moving fast. And things were changing. Acheson and his wife Alice arrived—Acheson to help with the manuscript—and were overnight guests at 219 North Delaware, an event that had the whole town talking, both because there had never before been a former Secretary of State in residence in Independence and because there had never before been “house guests” at 219 North Delaware, as far as anyone could recall.
On May 8, Truman’s seventy-first birthday, with some two thousand people gathering in Slover Park, he turned the first spade of earth at an old-fashioned home-style groundbreaking ceremony for his library, complete with band music. Then, as they had also never done before, he and Bess hosted a buffet dinner at home for some 150 people. It was a sight, wrote Margaret, that she never thought she would see. There was her mother standing at the door of her “sanctuary,” welcoming each guest.
Flying to San Francisco on June 24, to attend a tenth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, Truman looked out over Wyoming and the Rockies from the vantage point of 14,000 feet, and as he wrote in his room that night in the Fairmont Hotel, he couldn’t help but think of Solomon Young.
We’d left home at 7 A.M. and at 11 A.M. were all past the high mountains. Grandpa would have left home at what is now Grandview at four A.M. and in all probability would have been ten or twelve miles west of the Missouri line. What an age we live and have our being in! We had a mountain lake trout lunch and before we realized it were descending into the Great Salt Lake Valley….
With the deadline pressure on in the offices at the Federal Reserve Bank Building, the work hours grew longer. In the final days of June, some of the staff were working round the clock.
Truman handed over a 500,000-word manuscript to Ed Thompson in Kansas City on July 4, 1955, and told him, “I never really appreciated before what is involved in trying to write a book.”
His first check was for $110,000, and with it came five promissory notes for the rest of the $600,000, the last installment not to be paid until January 1960.
The opening installment of the Memoirs, titled “The Most Momentous First 18 Days,” appeared in the September 25 issue of Life, with a cover photograph of the former President and First Lady standing in front of their Independence home. Doubleday’s publication of Volume One, calledYear of Decisions, followed five weeks later, with an author’s autographing party in the grand ballroom of the Muehlebach, on Tuesday, November 2, 1955.
To the delight of the publisher, Truman had agreed to sign books for all who came. “I expect to use, probably, a couple of $1.75 fountain pens that I bought at the Twenty-five Cent Store, along with a half dozen others that I happen to have, and I don’t want to be in any advertising stunt [for the pens] whatever,” Truman had written to Samuel Vaughan, Doubleday’s advertising manager. “I will go along with any party arrangements which you make for Doubleday, but don’t get me into any advertising for pens, cakes or anything, because I won’t do it.”
Arriving in Kansas City a few days in advance to make arrangements, Vaughan was distressed to hear people asking why they would want to come to such an occasion for Truman, “when we see him all the time anyway.” Greatly concerned, Vaughan worked to line up Battery D veterans, the Boy Scouts, anyone he could think of, to be sure there was a crowd. But he need not have bothered. More than three hundred people were already in line waiting before the party began.
“Hand Firm to the End” was the headline in the next morning’s paper.
It was almost unbelievable. “I had no idea it would be anything like this,” Truman said as he saw the crowds grow, the people still coming, hour after hour. His hand fairly flew as he signed books, until he was doing six to eight autographs a minute. If ever there was a demonstration of his extraordinary vitality, this was it. He kept going hour after hour, not only signing his name but greeting people. “There, that one’s all slicked up,” he would say with satisfaction, finishing his signature and handing over the book.
By the end of the first session, he had signed over a thousand copies In all, incredibly, he turned out four thousand autographs in just five and a half hours. Reporters on hand, his publishers, watched in amazement. Earlier, when Ken McCormick of Doubleday had suggested to Truman that perhaps he might prefer to have the autographs done by a machine Truman had replied, “I will autograph as many as I can. I am not an expert with a machine, and I would rather do it by hand.”
Reviewers rightly treated the book as a major event. “The first volume of Harry Truman’s Memoirs (Doubleday) provides a more detailed report on life at the summit of American politics than a President has given since the early days of the Republic,” wrote Richard Rovere in The New Yorker. Truman was commended for his contribution to history, his understanding of presidential power, his clarity, attention to detail, “his appealing mixture of modesty and confidence,” as the historian Allan Nevins wrote on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. There was too little autobiography, it was thought, too much that read like an official paper worked over by many hands. (In the preface, Truman freely acknowledged the help he had been given.) Richard Rovere, having covered Truman for years, missed the characteristic pungent manner of expression, Truman in his own words, and wished there were more of what was to be found in Truman’s letters to his mother, eighteen of which were included in the book, providing, as Rovere said, not only relief from the state-paper style but “wonderful insights” into Truman’s style as a human being.
As the reviewers implied, too many people had been involved in the task. Truman had been homogenized. He had been made at times even tedious. Acheson’s warnings should have been taken more to heart. Truman himself—the vitality, the vividness of his letters, his own way of expressing himself—was missing through great portions of the book. But to a large degree, of course, Truman himself had been responsible for this, by agreeing to the process by which the work was produced. Also, from the start, he seems to have seen the task more as one of recording history than telling his own story. Francis Heller, for example, would never recall Truman speaking of the work in progress as “memoirs,” only as “my history.”
The inevitable comparisons with Churchill’s history of the war were made, though not so unfavorably as might have been supposed. As a literary performance, said Allan Nevins, Truman’s book did not rank among the best memoirs of the era. Nevertheless, Nevins emphasized, this was a “volume of distinction.” His praise exceeded his criticism and the review, like others, became as much a judgment of the author as of the book. If not one of the landmark memoirs of the century, it was nonetheless an admirable work by one of the most important figures of the century.
Altogether, it well expressed one of the most conscientious, dynamic and (within his horizons) clearsighted Presidents we have ever had [wrote Nevins]…. His penetrating shrewdness has been underrated…. We are equally impressed by his exceptionally high conception of the Presidency and his determination to live up to it…. In ordinary affairs he seemed commonplace, and in small matters he could make curious blunders. But he grew in his office as few Presidents have ever done; and he was sustained by an unusual knowledge of American history and a firm grasp of our best traditions. To the major crisis he brought statesmanlike insight, energy, and courage. There was greatness in the man….
The large effect of the book and the series in Life—and Volume Two, which appeared the next spring—was to create renewed interest in Truman and a reconsideration of his presidency. And while his account of events also stirred controversy—protests and rebuttals by such major protagonists as Jimmy Byrnes and Henry Wallace—publication of the Memoirs marked the beginning of what was to be a steady revival of Truman’s reputation, and the beginning of an exceptionally happy time for him. Indeed, it may be said that publication of the Memoirs marked the opening of one of the happiest passages in his long life.