Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [94]
The Harry S. Truman Library was dedicated on July 6, 1957. It wasn’t built on the Truman family farm as Harry had hoped. His brother and sister had vetoed that idea. The land was too valuable. “Ain’t no use wastin’ good farmland on any old dang library,” said his brother Vivian. So instead the library was built on thirteen acres donated by the city of Independence, just a mile down the road from the Truman home on Delaware Street.
Sitting next to Truman on the dais at the library’s dedication was Herbert Hoover. The only two living ex-presidents had reconciled in 1955, when Harry invited Hoover to attend a fundraising dinner for the library in San Francisco. Hoover, who was raising funds for his own library in West Branch, Iowa, accepted the invitation. “I have a fellow feeling,” he wrote Truman, “for I have one of those burdens of my own.” Thereafter, Truman and Hoover corresponded regularly, and their mutual admiration, grudging at first, blossomed into genuine friendship. When Harry invited him to attend the library’s dedication, Hoover replied, “One of the important jobs of our very exclusive Trade Union is preserving libraries.” Harry returned the favor when he attended the dedication of Hoover’s library in 1962. “I feel sure that I am one of his closest friends and that’s the reason I am here,” Harry told the crowd.
Later that year, Hoover wrote Harry to thank him for sending him a copy of Truman Speaks, a compilation of lectures Harry had delivered at Columbia University. “This is an occasion when I should like to add something more,” Hoover wrote after the obligatory thank you, “because yours has been a friendship which has reached deeper into my life than you know…. When you came to the White House within a month you opened the door to me to the only profession I knew, public service, and you undid some disgraceful action that had been taken in the prior years. For all of this and your friendship, I am deeply grateful.” Coming from one as reserved as Hoover, it was an extraordinary letter, and it moved Truman deeply. He had it framed, and he displayed it in his office at the library.
Like a marble statue suddenly come to life, Truman delighted in surprising visitors to the library, especially schoolchildren, with whom he would hold impromptu question-and-answer sessions—with Harry asking as many questions of the children as they asked of him. He always pointed out that one of them could be president one day—after all, he had never expected to be president himself. Sometimes he would play the piano for them, too.
Truman kept an office at the library, which finally freed him of the financial burden of renting one in downtown Kansas City. However, other expenses, including postage, were still his responsibility, and his finances continued to trouble him. In January 1958, Truman and his brother and sister sold off the family farm in Grandview. It broke Harry’s heart, but he had no choice. If the farm hadn’t been sold, he wrote, “I would practically be on relief.” The land was purchased by a developer who turned it into a shopping center called Truman Corners. Only the family’s farmhouse was preserved. Today it sits within spitting distance of a McDonald’s, a Sam’s Club, an Applebee’s, and an IHOP.
Harry and Bess on the porch of their house in Independence on Valentine’s Day 1960. When a friend once offered to arrange a private screening of the movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Harry declined. “Real gentlemen,” he said, “prefer gray hair.”
Ever more openly, Harry continued to lobby