NOTES OF CONCERN...
.....Jack Blair
“I’m Just Wild About Harry “
(and Bess)
This was the title of a song by Eubie Blake for a Broadway Musical but in my mind it applies to Harry Truman. Over the Christmas Holiday I was watching C-Span’s program on First Ladies, specifically about Bess Truman, and it reminded me of how much I admired Harry Truman.
When FDR picked Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman his health was failing. Knowing how shrewd Roosevelt was, it is a certainty in my thinking that he felt the Senator from Missouri would be a good successor.
As it turned out, Harry S. Truman succeeded to the presidency in a very short time after Roosevelt’s historic fourth term electoral victory.
The Roosevelts, over many years, had assembled many personal things in The White House. They had tables, sofas, chairs, pictures, paintings etc. When Harry and Bess Truman moved into The White House, they brought only their piano from their small Washington apartment.
Harry Truman respected the presidency and demanded that others do so. He did not require that they like him personally but that they honor the position.
It is reported when he entered The White House he made an inventory of the items in his desk, right down to the number of pencils. When he left The White House he made certain all those items were still present in his desk drawer ready for Ike’s use.
When he returned to his home in Independence, Missouri, he told reporters who were present that he would respond to their questions after he “carried the valises into the house.” No servants. No Secret Service. No personal aides.
Harry and Bess were happy to be at home in Missouri. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Congress provided Secret Service protection to former presidents. Truman railed against this. His position was that if someone had wanted to assassinate him they would have done so between 1952 and 1963.
As the Secret Service tried to convince him to permit them a presence on his property and the opportunity to protect him, he refused. This resulted in their having to establish a perimeter of protection and operate off the Truman property, across the street, in a house they had to buy.
In the 1960’s I worked on the advance staff of The White House. Specifically, I was working a trip by President Nixon to speak to newspaper editors and publishers to be held in Kansas City, Kansas.
It was understood that sitting presidents who traveled to geographic areas where former presidents lived would make a courtesy call on the former president. Accordingly, Nixon would call on Truman in Independence, MO. Truman didn’t want to see him and Nixon didn’t want to go. Bess stepped in with an illness that sent her to the hospital and Nixon grabbed onto that as a reason not to bother Harry with a visit and I was tasked with going to Independence to hand deliver a letter from Nixon to Truman.
So fate provided me an opportunity to meet a man I had so admired.
I will never forget the warm and pleasant atmosphere of a small town that boasted a former leader of the free world as a resident. From the Victorian that served as home to Harry and Bess they looked out their windows on their friends and neighbors. In their safe little neighborhood Harry would take his daily constitutional. Like so many American families, the house was inherited from parents. In this case, it was the home in which Bess had grown up.
If living in a big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue and traveling all over the world to be greeted by kings, queens, dictators, despots, and people from so many nations impressed them one would be hard pressed to find any evidence of it.
Bess Truman probably spent less time in The White House than any other First Lady. She preferred Independence, MO. In Harry’s collected letters you can find many written to Bess from The White House telling her how much he missed her and how lonely he was when she was away.
Bess Truman hosted royalty at The White House but it was well known that the party she planned with greatest care and concern was the one she gave for her bridge club from Missouri when they came to visit her in Washington.
Harry and Bess Truman were great examples of what I believe government should be.
They were plain people with simple needs who stepped up to serve for a period of time during which their greatest dream was to return home to the simple pleasures of life in Independence, MO. They did not expect the people of the United States to provide for them, to protect them, or to see to their every need when their service was done.
They were citizen servants in the great history of government. Their term of service did not change who they were. They knew exactly who they were when they went to the presidency and when they left.
Bottom line: they were glad to “help out.”
