Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [96]
But, at Harry’s insistence, Mike Westwood stayed.
Harry and Bess often returned to New York to visit Margaret, Clifton, and the grandchildren. They usually traveled by plane. Harry still took a walk most mornings, accompanied by a pack of reporters, including, now, television crews. But, as the years passed, his pace slowed, the walks grew shorter, and his famously acidulous observations occasionally gave way to simpleminded crotchetiness. Civil rights demonstrators were “busybodies,” antiwar protestors were “silly.”
He became something of a grumpy old man, yet the nation’s fondness for him only grew, perhaps because he represented a bygone era whose passing, given the tumultuous times, was bemoaned. He was humble, too, in a way his successors were not. Harry had become an elder statesman, though he hated the term. To him, a statesman was just a politician who was dead.
In 1969 Harry ranked seventh in the Gallup Poll’s annual list of America’s “Most Admired Men.” (For what it’s worth, Nixon ranked first.) More recently, a 2004 poll by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner found that 58 percent of Americans viewed Truman favorably.
Historians began to reassess Harry too. In 1962, Arthur Schlesinger polled seventy-five historians to rank the presidents. The top five were Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Wilson, and Jefferson. According to the historians, they were the “great” presidents. Harry—whom Walter Trohan had called “one of the most mediocre men ever to inherit power”—ranked ninth. He was one of the “near great” presidents. The results were published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine that July. On file at the Truman Library is a copy of the article with notations made in Harry’s characteristic slashing script. Harry’s top five were Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Wilson, and Jackson. Above the picture of John Adams, whom the historians ranked tenth, he scribbled, “Should be about 18.” Above the picture of himself he wrote, “Not to be considered.” It was Harry’s belief that a president should be dead “about thirty years” before his administration could be fairly assessed.
It is delightful to imagine the aging ex-president, pencil in hand, sitting on his porch on a sultry summer Sunday morning in Missouri, correcting the rankings.
On October 13, 1964, Harry slipped and fell in his second-floor bathroom. His head smashed against the sink, shattering his glasses and cutting his forehead. He fell against the bathtub, fracturing two ribs. The next day he received a telegram from Herbert Hoover:
Bathtubs are a menace to ex-presidents for as you may recall a bathtub rose up and fractured my vertebrae when I was in Venezuela on your world famine mission in 1946. My warmest sympathy and best wishes for your speedy recovery.
Those were the last words Herbert Hoover is known to have written. Three days later he collapsed. Massive internal bleeding was the cause. He never regained consciousness and died on October 20. He was ninety. At 31 years and 231 days, Hoover’s is the longest ex-presidency in history. Truman, of course, was unable to attend the funeral. He sent a telegram to Hoover’s two sons. “He was my good friend and I was his,” he wrote.
Harry was back home in a few days, but he never fully recovered from the fall. His morning walks grew less frequent, and he went into his office at the library less often. He grew thin and frail, his face gaunt behind massive horn-rimmed glasses. The man who had found it impossible to travel incognito in 1953 was now unrecognizable, even to many of his neighbors in Independence.
In 1968 Richard Nixon, one of the two men in politics he truly hated, was elected president. It was a bitter pill for Harry to swallow. He had wanted