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Truman(84)

By:Roy Jenkins


The fence at least was already there and did not cost money. But the office which he established in the union   Bank building in Kansas City did, although not on a huge scale. He wrote in 1957 that he had spent $153,000 on it over 3½ years. This, he said, he had been able to do only because the accident of the sale of his share of the Grandview farm land to the shopping centre developers had safeguarded him from financial embarrassment. The experience had converted him to the desirability of some government help for ex-Presidents, a proposition towards which he had earlier been austerely cool. ‘I don’t want a pension and do not expect one’, he wrote to John W. McCormack, the Democratic leader in the House, on January 10th, 1957, ‘but I do think 70% of the expenses or overhead should be paid by the Government—the 30% is what I would ordinarily have been out on my own hook if I hadn’t tried to meet the responsibilities of being a former President.’1

The work of the office was directed to answering a large volume of mostly friendly mail, sorting his presidential papers, writing his memoirs, and bringing to fruition his plans for the building of a Truman Library and Museum. The memoirs were not a great success, either financially or of esteem. They were punctual, despite the fact that Truman had a fairly severe illness in 1954, and were published in two substantial volumes in 1955 and 1956. They gave a clear, narrative account of the main events with which he had been concerned. If they were undisfigured by his prejudices or outrageous remarks, they were equally unadorned by originality or penetration. They received the slightly bland reception which their slightly bland style deserved. Coming out at a time when his reputation still hovered a little uncertainly in the haze of the Eisenhower afternoon, they did not strengthen the market for his writing. And the direct return was disappointing. This however, appears to have been more due to the taxation arrangement than to the gross payment. The book was sold outright to the same publisher for the same sum of money that Eisenhower had received in 1948 for Crusade in Europe. Truman, however, claimed that, owing to a taxation change in the meantime, Eisenhower had been left with $437,000 net, whereas he was left, after tax and research and other expenses, with little more than $37,000. There emerges the strong feeling either that he was not comparing like with like or that he had a very bad accountant. In either case the contrast with Eisenhower’s ‘killing’ exacerbated his slight sense of disappointment.

It was however more than outweighed by the remarkable success of the Truman Library. It was planned, built and opened to the public within 4½ years of his leaving the White House. This was in spite of some initial hesitancy about the location. There was never any question of its being other than in the Kansas City area. He never contemplated a Washington memorial. He was at first attracted by the idea of building the Library on part of the old farm land at Grandview. However, the temptations of the developers, coinciding with a generous offer from the City of Independence of a good and substantial site adjacent to the public park, barely a mile from North Delaware Street, deflected him from Grandview. Money came in well, from both corporate and private donors. There were 17,000 separate subscriptions. The last million dollars was raised by Truman himself on an intensive lecture tour.

There was no embarrassment in his mind about seeking money for what was in effect a memorial to himself. He did not see it in vainglorious terms. He did not want a Washington obelisk, a Jefferson rotunda or a Lincoln temple. What he did want was a political science teaching workshop which would make vivid the nature of the office of President, admittedly by exhibiting the memorabilia of himself as local hero, in a part of the United States which had not previously participated in Federal history in a way that had Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio or Illinois.

He had a good deal of conceit and a certain vanity at this stage. But the vanity was essentially about the grandeur of the office which he had rather surprisingly managed successfully to occupy. He wanted the people—and particularly schoolchildren—in the mid-West and elsewhere to know about this greatest democratic office in the world and, as he saw it, the five facets of the President’s role. If the exploitation of this splendour through a library and museum devoted to his own tenure involved some self-aggrandisement, so be it. But that was genuinely not the primary purpose. He had a passionate desire to instruct about the presidency as an institution, and devoted much of his time to addressing quite small school and college audiences on the subject.

The Library was admirably constructed for such a purpose. It also had the unique attribute at that stage of a resident president. Just as the English National Trust rightly believes that an inhabited country house is more interesting to the public than a dead shell, so Independence had the advantage over Hyde Park or, still more obviously, Mount Vernon or Monticello, of having the man it commemorated on the premises. For the first nine or ten years he was quite liable to descend on any visiting party and give them a quick and vigorous tutorial.