‘The White House is quiet as a church. I can hear the planes at the airport warming up. As always there is a traffic roar—sounds like wind and rain through the magnolias.
‘Bess’s mother is dying across the hallway. She was ninety years old August 4th. Vivian’s [his brother’s] mother-in-law passed on Saturday at eleven thirty. She also was ninety just a month after or before Mrs Wallace. When you are sixty-eight death watches come often …
‘Since last September Mother Wallace has been dying -even before that, but we’ve kept doctors and nurses with her night and day and have kept her alive. We had hoped -and still hope—she’ll survive until Christmas. Our last as President.
‘This old House is a most remarkable one. Started in 1792 by George Washington’s laying of the corner stone. Burned in 1814, by the British. Occupied by John and Abigail Adams …
‘Jefferson receiving diplomats in house slippers and dressing gown. Dolley Madison loading pictures and books and documents into a wagon and escaping just two jumps ahead of the British …
‘Then Monroe refinishing the rehabilitated old place with his own and some imported French furniture. And catching hell because he sent to Paris to buy things he could not obtain in the primitive U.S.A.!
‘Old John Quincy Adams who went swimming in the Chesapeake and Potomac Canal every morning … Then old Andy Jackson and his rough, tough backwoodsmen walking on the furniture with muddy boots and eating a 300 pound cheese, grinding it into the lovely Adams and Monroe carpets!’12
Mrs Wallace died on December 5th, the day after a rather grand farewell dinner with wives for the Cabinet, the senior White House staff and, almost inevitably, the Chief Justice. In spite of her thirty-three years of determined co-habitation, Truman seems genuinely to have mourned her. ‘She was a great lady,’ he wrote. ‘When I hear these mother-in-law jokes, I don’t laugh.’13
The family took her out to Missouri to be buried, and then came back to Washington for a White House Christmas which could hardly be regarded as the end of a tradition, for it was only the second which they had spent in what Margaret Truman liked referring to as ‘the great white gaol’.
In early January, when life might have been expected to be getting a little flat, there was a Churchill visitation. Truman had come to adore Churchill. He ought (not in a moral but in a matching sense) to have preferred Attlee, but he did not. Churchill, for Truman, represented greatness without Roosevelt’s pretension. The thought of the Hudson Valley always rather oppressed him. Blenheim and Chartwell were too remote to have any such effect. And Churchill reciprocated, with a mixture of flattery and foresight, by treating Truman as a world statesman. He, in turn, almost certainly preferred Truman to Roosevelt, with whom his relationship was much more a necessary and beneficial alliance of occasion than it was a partnership of affection. Roosevelt, in the early 1940s, accentuated the power of the United States by being mildly patronizing, even to Churchill. Truman, in the early 1950s, when in fact the power discrepancy had grown greater, mitigated it by being respectful, although not subservient.
Churchill, in January 1953, responded by turning his full beam upon the outgoing President. Of course he saw Eisenhower, with whom he would need to work for several years in the future, but he did so almost unobtrusively in New York in Baruch’s apartment. In Washington his undiluted attention was reserved for the alive but dying administration. He paid Truman a measured and massive compliment. He confessed to his dismay at the succession when Roosevelt died. ‘I misjudged you badly,’ Churchill added. ‘Since that time, you, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.’14
Truman gave him a dinner at which Acheson, Lovett, Harriman, and Omar Bradley assisted, and which seems almost to have got out of hand. Great jollity was contrived, with imaginary juries of historic figures empanelled to try both President and Prime Minister before an infernal (or maybe heavenly) tribunal. Acheson at least enjoyed himself immensely by presaging his 1960 thrust at Britain and saying to Churchill, in response to his confident growl that, wherever it was, he expected to be tried 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 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?’15
These festivities over, the Trumans were almost out of the White House. On January 15th the President made a farewell broadcast to the nation and—for almost the first time—was televised as well. He delivered what Robert Donovan well described as a ‘neighborly’ account of his stewardship. He thought that his presidency would be most remembered as the time when the cold war began to overshadow everyone’s life. ‘I have hardly had a day in office that has not been dominated by this all-embracing struggle … and always in the background there has been the atomic bomb.’ However, ‘starting an atomic war is totally unthinkable for rational men.’16