Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [97]
But when the new president, quite unexpectedly, asked if he could visit the Trumans, Harry could hardly refuse. As Margaret put it, “That special bond which links the residents of the White House prevailed over old animosities.” On March 22, 1969, the Nixons came to Independence. They spent about twenty minutes at the house on Delaware Street. The two men chatted while Bess showed Pat Nixon around the house. Then they went to the library, where Nixon presented Harry with a Steinway piano that had been in the White House when the Trumans lived there. Nixon sat down and played “The Missouri Waltz.” Truman disliked the song, of course, but that didn’t matter. His hearing wasn’t what it used to be. When Nixon finished, Harry turned to Bess and asked her what song he’d played.
A week later, Dwight Eisenhower died. Truman could not attend the funeral, but his public statement was characteristically both candid and generous. “General Eisenhower and I became political opponents but before that we were comrades in arms, and I will not forget his service to his country and to Western civilization.”
On June 28, 1969, Harry and Bess celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, quietly as usual. By the end of that year, Harry had stopped going to his library altogether. The morning walks stopped too, as he retreated into 219 Delaware Street.
On the afternoon of December 5, 1972, Harry left the house for the last time. He was taken by ambulance to Research Hospital in Kansas City to be treated for lung congestion. His condition deteriorated.
On the day after Christmas, Harry S. Truman died. He was eighty-eight.
Lyndon Johnson, now the only living ex-president, attended the funeral. He did not look well, and, less than a month later, on January 22, 1973, he died of a heart attack. He was sixty-four. For the first time since the death of Calvin Coolidge forty years earlier, America had no living ex-president. Nixon would rectify that by resigning on August 9, 1974.
Now alone in the big house on Delaware Street, Bess continued to follow politics and baseball closely. She was honorary chairman of Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton’s 1974 reelection campaign. “She knew every player in the Kansas City Royals starting lineup and had very strong opinions of the plusses and minuses of each one,” marveled Eagleton. Arthritis confined her to a wheelchair, but she was active until a fall and a stroke in the early 1980s.
The longest-lived first lady in American history, Bess Truman died on October 18, 1982. She was ninety-seven.
Harry and Bess are buried next to each other in the courtyard of the Truman Library.
Harry is on the driver’s side.
Postscript
On April 4, 2008, in the midst of her bruising campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, New York Senator Hillary Clinton released her and her husband’s tax returns for the previous eight years. The returns showed that the former president and first lady had earned a combined $109 million.
Harry Truman must have been spinning in his grave.
The Clintons’ income included thirty million from their bestselling books, and as much as fifteen million from an investment partnership with one of their top campaign fundraisers. Bill Clinton earned more than ten million in speaking fees alone. The former president was paid $650,000 by the investment firm Goldman Sachs for giving just four speeches.
“We’ve come a long way from Harry Truman,” former Clinton aide Leon Panetta wryly observed. Indeed, being an ex-president has changed a lot since the Secret Service dropped off the Trumans at Union Station in Washington on January 20, 1953. As the Washington Post noted, the Clintons had transformed themselves into a phenomenally successful global brand. Today’s ex-president is a small corporation unto himself, with annual revenues of seven (or more) figures and a sizeable workforce.
Ironically,