Only after 1966 did the vigour and the immanence begin to recede. Until then the Library was his diurnal home. It solved the problems of the expensive and not very convenient Kansas City office. Once it had been built by private subscription its upkeep was taken over by the National Archives and Records Services, an offshoot of an agency of the Federal Government. This conduit of public money brought good practical office accommodation, separate from the replica of the Oval Office which was rather elaborately constructed in another wing, and other public support for Truman. Thereafter he had no problems on this account. Even the Secret Service men came back after the assassination of President Kennedy.
The Library was not only a most satisfactory convenience for Truman, which, in his daughter’s view, became ‘one of the great joys of [his] old age’. It was also a place for pilgrimages of reconciliation and tribute. Truman found it very difficult to resist the offer of a visit. What would he have done had MacArthur proposed himself? He received Eisenhower graciously in 1961 and the Nixons without wincing in 1969. (At a Museum dedicated to the institution of the presidency it would of course have been difficult to do otherwise with the incumbent President.) Kennedy, with whom a little intra-party reconciliation was desirable, came between his nomination and the election in 1960. Lyndon Johnson, with whom no reconciliation was necessary (he and Truman always got on fairly well) brought a great entourage for the symbolic signing there of the Medicare Bill in July 1965.
Until the mid-1960s, when he was over eighty, Truman remained active both politically and physically—although he always confined his exercise to brisk urban walks, sometimes interspersed with on the hoof political comment to attendant journalists. He did not think it necessary to show his mature statesmanship by becoming less anti-Republican, and he did not hesitate to express his preferences within the Democratic Party. In August 1969, he was writing in good uninhibited form to Acheson about ‘Tricky Dicky and Alibi Ike’.3 The Republican candidates were always satisfactorily unacceptable to him. The Democratic candidates were less satisfactorily acceptable. He never supported Stevenson after 1952. He wanted Harriman in 1956 and Symington in 1960. He several times referred to Kennedy as ‘this immature boy’ and believed that his father had bought him the nomination. However, as an old Democratic ‘pro’, he rallied to Stevenson in 1956 and to Kennedy in 1960 as soon as the campaigns got underway. Later he responded more strongly to Kennedy’s attentions, attended the 1961 inauguration and later went with his wife and daughter to stay a night in the White House. However, Johnson in 1964 was the first Democratic candidate who would have been his first choice. Humphrey in 1968 was probably more or less satisfactory to him unless his memory went back too powerfully to the young Mayor of Minneapolis’s support for Eisenhower in July 1948, but he played little part in that 1968 campaign. In 1972 he played no part, and it is not known what he thought of George McGovern or whether he was even able to vote for him. He had already faded far by that November, and was dead before Nixon’s second inauguration in January 1973.
In the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s he travelled a fair amount: Washington occasionally, although never to the White House while Eisenhower was there; a good deal of mostly unpaid speaking and lecturing about the country; frequent family visits to New York where his daughter, married in 1955 to Clifton Daniels, high in the hierarchy of the New York Times, produced four grandsons for him to treat with respect and enjoyment rather than excessive domestic intimacy (he mostly installed himself firmly in the Carlyle Hotel); and on three occasions to Europe, but never, except for Hawaii, not then a state, elsewhere outside his own country.
The first European visit in 1956 was something of a stately progress, and deservedly so. The Trumans were away for seven weeks, in Italy, Austria, France and the Netherlands. They finished in Britain, where Truman (at the age of 72) saw London for the first and last time, received, without opposition, an Oxford honorary degree3 and lunched with the Churchills at Chartwell. The second European journey was only two years later, but a much quieter, purely holiday visit to Italy and France. The third was to Athens in March 1964, where he represented President Johnson at the funeral of King Paul. He was alone (that is without Mrs Truman) on that trip and played poker all night on the aeroplane. Such a reversion to indiscipline showed no sign of exhausting him before his eightieth birthday celebrations, which came later that spring and included numerous luncheons, dinners and even breakfasts, as well as a speech to the Senate.