His reputation at that stage was strongly in the ascendant. In July 1962, for example, the New York Times magazine had amused itself by getting Arthur M. Schlesinger Snr to repeat the poll of seventy-five historians which he had first conducted in 1948. They were asked to arrange presidents in order of ‘greatness’ or ‘near-greatness’. The ‘greats’ came out as Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wilson and Jefferson. The ‘near-greats’, also in order, were Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Polk, Truman, John Adams, and Cleveland.4 It was a far cry from 1946 or even 1952. He reacted to this calmly but with pleasure. ‘I don’t know how they came to put me so high up on the list’, he wrote to a Congressman who had somewhat supererogatively sent him the article, ‘but I appreciate it nevertheless. If I had been arranging the first five in the row of the great, I would have put Washington first, Jefferson second, Woodrow Wilson third, Lincoln fourth and Franklin Roosevelt fifth. I, in all probability, would have moved Andrew Jackson into that row and made six of them, but I didn’t have anything to do with making it up.’4
In his early eighties his powers, not so much of mind as of body, began noticeably to fail. He had a bad bathroom fall in the autumn of 1964. He lost a lot of weight and became a very emaciated old man. He also lost his mobility and for his last six or seven years was more or less confined to his house. Suddenly, over a weekend in the summer of 1966, he ceased to go regularly to the Library (the Nixon visit was a rare subsequent exception) and ceased also to walk briskly about the town in the early mornings, or at any other time of day. When a prominent Independence citizen who was the ex-President’s lawyer was asked by an interviewer what Truman thought of some major developments which took place in the town square around 1970 he in effect replied that he had few thoughts about them because he never saw them. Bess Truman, who had never taxed herself very heavily, remained much more active, and even after 29 years of courtship and 53 years of marriage still managed 10 years of widowhood before dying at the age of 97.
Truman’s agility, although non-athletic, was an essential part of his personality. When it went a good part of his mental zest went with it. His daughter insists that he continued to read two newspapers a day and to keep abreast of events well into the last year of his life. But he lost his desire to comment upon these events or to communicate outside the small family circle. After 1970 his life, which had already gone into a lower gear in 1966, quietly subsided. He died in a Kansas City hospital on December 26th, 1972. He was buried in the courtyard of the Library.
The commemorative stone, while not elaborate, is neither eloquent nor sparse. It lists with equal prominence each office which he had held, from Eastern Judge to President of the United States. This flatness was in a sense appropriate, for he had treated all the offices with equal respect, and behaved in each of them with equal determination to do his best, and equal equanimity about the comments of most others when he had done it. It so happened that the first offices led to the building of some good roads and the last to the building of a Western world which enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and freedom from major war for a generation. In each case he built well, honestly, and without pretension.