Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [10]
Back at the house, he had breakfast at the kitchen table with Bess (who did not share his penchant for early rising). Around nine he went into his office, a three-room suite on the eleventh floor of the Federal Reserve Building in Kansas City. Sometimes Mike Westwood drove him, but often he drove himself. “Harry S. Truman” was painted in black letters on the opaque glass of the door to the suite, just like a detective agency in a pulp novel. (Truman claimed the only reason he’d even put his name on the door was because people kept mistaking his office for a restroom.) He had two assistants: his private secretary, Rose Conway, who had served him in the same capacity when he was president, and Frances Myers, a receptionist who had also worked in the Truman White House. He paid their salaries out of his own pocket. Much of his day was spent answering mail. He received more than seventy thousand pieces in the first two weeks after he left the White House, and as many as a thousand a day thereafter: notes from well-wishers, invitations to everything from church suppers to national conventions, autograph requests. Budding politicians wrote him asking for advice (or endorsements). The founder of a new cult tried to recruit him. When Truman casually mentioned in an interview that he was looking for a silver dollar minted in 1924, the year of Margaret’s birth, silver dollars poured in by the dozens. Truman estimated that less than one-half of one percent of the letters came from “crackpots,” a statistic that surprised him. “I expected more,” he said. “I had many chances to make people mad.”
He answered each and every piece of mail because, he said, “I have always believed that if a person goes to the trouble of writing a letter, even a critical letter, I should answer or at least acknowledge it.” The postage was, of course, solely his responsibility. At three cents a pop, it would cost him nearly ten thousand dollars in just his first year out of office.
Truman maintained an open-door policy, and just about anybody who dropped by was likely to get an audience with the former president. “Many people,” he said, “feel that a president or an ex-president is partly theirs—and they are right to some extent—and that they have a right to call upon him.” His office number was even listed in the Kansas City telephone directory: Baltimore 6150. (His home number was unlisted, probably in deference to Bess.)
When he wasn’t answering mail, entertaining uninvited visitors, or taking unsolicited telephone calls, Truman was busy raising money—not for himself but for the grand library he planned to build on the family farm in Grandview. The library would serve as a repository for his papers, which, for the time being, were stored in four hundred four-drawer filing cabinets in a room on the fourth floor of the Jackson County Courthouse.
With his keen sense of history, Truman well understood the importance of preserving his papers. “Did you know that Millard Fillmore’s son burned some of his papers?” he asked an interviewer. “A good many of Jackson’s papers were lost—some were found again, but a good many were lost…. Lincoln’s son burned some of his papers. Think of it, some of Abraham Lincoln’s papers burned! It’s awful.”
Truman envisioned the library as a “research center for the benefit of small colleges” in the Midwest. He wasn’t interested in a memorial to himself, he insisted. “I’ll be cussed and discussed for the next generation anyway.” Besides, Truman didn’t think much of memorials to the living. “You can never tell what foolishness they may get into before they get into a pine box and then the memorial sometimes has to be torn down.”
A private corporation called the Harry S. Truman Library, Inc., had been established to raise money for the project—money that could not be used for Truman’s personal or business expenses.
Around four o’clock he would go home. After dinner,