Truman(83)

On the 16th he made his last (but not lasting—it was reversed by Congress with Eisenhower’s approval) significant decision: he declared that off-shore oil belonged to the nation and not to the states off whose shores it lay. On the morning of the 20th (another sparkling day, as in 1949) he wound up his office from 8.45 to 10.30 a.m., greeted the Cabinet and their wives in the Red Room before his final exit from the mansion for the drive to Capitol Hill with Eisenhower and the ceremony there, leading for him to the complete relinquishment of responsibility. So relieved, he drove with his wife and daughter to Dean Acheson’s house in Georgetown where there was a lunch for the outgoing Cabinet and a few other close associates. This was a highly successful occasion, with the ex-President on ebullient form ‘… an absolutely wonderful affair,’ it was described by Margaret Truman, ‘full of jokes and laughter and a few tears’. Then, typically, Truman slipped off to the apartment of a member of his White House staff‘for a nap’. Thus fortified he proceeded to union   Station, where a crowd of over 5,000 saw him off on his last journey in the presidential Pullman car. He made a little speech from the rear platform, and the train pulled out in the early evening to the swelling chorus of Auld Lang Syne.

It was 8.15 the next evening when (an hour late) they reached Independence. There had been small crowds at most of the stations along the route, even during the night, and big ones at St Louis and Independence itself. Typically again, he had got out and had a haircut at one of the Missouri stations. The journey over and the presidential car dismissed not merely to Washington but to near oblivion, for no subsequent president did much train travel, he drove to North Delaware Street. Here there was another crowd of 5,000. When asked subsequently what was the first thing he did when he got home, he was reported as saying: ‘I carried the grips up to the attic.’17 But he may have exaggerated his own matter of factness. Perhaps his diary entry captured his mood better. Commenting on this last great display of respect and affection and the cumulative effect of them all, he wrote: ‘Mrs T and I were overcome. It was the pay-off for thirty years of hell and hard work.’18





12

A QUIET END


Truman’s retirement was one of the longest in the twentieth-century history of the presidency: just three weeks short of twenty years. Only Hoover survived for longer—31½ years as an ex-president, and his retirement was by no means as complete; he undertook several important tasks on the fringes of government for the Truman administration.1 Truman’s own long and tranquil survival was the more remarkable as, at the time of leaving the White House, he was the oldest President but three ever to have exercised executive power,2

Throughout these twenty years Truman neither deluded himself with thoughts of a return to power nor greatly sought to make money. When Churchill agreeably told him in 1956 that ‘it would be a great thing for the world if [he] were to become President of the United States again,’ Truman realistically replied that there was no chance of that. Nor did he ever pursue his rather wild 1951 idea of trying to return to the Senate. He believed, with some force, that former Presidents should be given honorary Senate seats, but this was more a general constitutional reflection than any attempt at personal self-seeking. He spoke out, sometimes over-forthrightly, on internal Democratic Party affairs, but he was notably loath to step in and proffer his advice on matters of national security.

During his first year out of office he received a number of offers of lucrative employment involving only a very small commitment of time. None of them- was of very high quality. He was offered nothing comparable with Eisenhower’s Presidency of Columbia University, or with the sort of blue chip business appointment which many ex-Secretaries of the Treasury easily acquire. It must of course be remembered that he was aged 69 and pretty firmly Missouri-based. What was forthcoming, however, were manifestly attempts by second rank enterprises to buy his name rather than his wisdom. He rightly refused.

He was not greedy, he was not extravagant, and he was not by this stage without some modest resources of his own. His financial altruism, however, was modified by two considerations. First he was eager, partly for reasons of prestige, to do as well as he could out of his writings, and particularly his memoirs. Second he became resentful about the very considerable sums of personal money which, unless he was to ignore his correspondents and sit at home with nothing to do all day, he felt forced to spend on maintaining an office.

At first he received no support of any sort from the Federal Government: no pension, no secretarial or other assistance, no security protection. His Secret Service guards had been removed even before he left Washington. They simply said goodbye to him as he got aboard the train at union   Station. He had travelled home unprotected through the crowds across half the continent. He was equally unguarded from the sightseers who subsequently came in fairly substantial numbers to stare at 219, North Delaware Street. His only screen was the iron fence which in somewhat un-American fashion, but, he claimed, based on the experience of Thomas Jefferson and the advice of Herbert Hoover, he kept around the house. It was all remarkably different from today’s practice.