“You guys let me down,” he said.
The photographers expressed their confusion at the president’s remark. “Come on, boys,” Truman said, “you have photographed me in every possible situation. I stopped back there at that gas station to use the men’s room, and there wasn’t one photographer to take my picture in that place.” Roars of laughter followed.
The Truman family was a curiosity for Americans. They were so different from previous First Families—the aristocratic Roosevelts, the wealthy Hoovers. Mrs. Truman stood five foot four, with gray hair cropped short. She appeared well-tailored and matronly in conservative midwestern style, in a new wardrobe she had purchased at the dress shop Agasta Gowns on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. The staff kept a respectable distance, but liked her. Photographers knew to keep their camera lenses pointed elsewhere, and news scribes understood that whatever she said was off the record. “Despite Mrs. Truman’s reserve in public,” recalled George Elsey, “she was warmly human to those she knew.”
Harry’s favorite time of day was his bourbon cocktail with Bess. Privately, they talked through the issues the president faced, the speeches he was going to make, the policy decisions. But in public, Bess Truman formed her persona as the antithesis of Eleanor Roosevelt, who had used the position of First Lady to create her own political influence. Once, two years earlier, Bess was asked, “If it had been left to your choice, would you have gone into the White House in the first place?” She answered, “Most definitely would not have.” Would she want Margaret to become a First Lady? “No.” Did she think there would ever be a female president? “No.” Had living in the White House changed her view of politics and people? “No comment.”
The First Lady “wasn’t trying to run the world,” remembered Truman speechwriter Oscar Chapman. On the train in 1948, “she was just trying to help Harry. And I’m telling you, that went through that crowd [on the train], and you’ll never understand the feeling that a man has when you catch that so clearly, that this whole group was, ‘We’re going to help this man . . . because she’s out here trying to help him, and we’re going to help him too.’ You’d be amazed at the sincerity and the depth with which that particular group [Truman’s staff] felt towards Mrs. Truman.”
The Trumans’ only child, Margaret, had her own unique iconography. Society columnists were riveted by her. She had been twenty-one years old at the time her father became president. Now twenty-four, she was set on blazing a nontraditional path. A profile of her in the New York Times in 1946, “Margaret Truman, Career Girl,” summed up her story:
“The interest the public takes in Margaret Truman, as a young unmarried White House daughter, is wholly in the American tradition. In one notable respect, however, Miss Truman herself is not at all in the tradition of Presidential daughters of debutante age . . . [She is] earnestly working toward a career that no other Presidential daughter seems even to have thought of. The career would be in opera, as a coloratura soprano.”
Margaret had grown up listening to her father playing the piano, and would often sing while he played. Voice lessons led to her first professional appearance, on March 9, 1947, on a live broadcast of ABC’s Sunday Evening Hour. “Now don’t get scared,” her father wrote her before that night. “You can do it! And if anyone says you can’t, I’ll bust him in the snoot.”
Two days before Christmas in 1947, Margaret sang on a professional stage in front of a crowd that included the president of the United States, for the first time, at Constitution Hall in Washington. Some critics hailed her skill and courage; others thought her ability to lure crowds stemmed solely from her role as First Daughter. The Washington Post’s music critic Paul Hume said she needed to find a new instructor. Nevertheless, by 1948, “Margie,” as her father called her (with a hard g), was getting offers to appear onstage at Carnegie Hall, as a guest on the TV show Pepsodent Hour with Bob Hope, and from Cecil B. DeMille Productions in Hollywood.
Aboard the Truman Special, Margaret was, in her father’s words, “my greatest asset,” and the pride the president took in his daughter was a genuine, humanizing force. On the Ferdinand Magellan’s back platform at whistle-stops, crowds would yell for her.
“Where is Margaret?”
“How about a song?”
Still, there was no question of who was commanding this steel-wheeled adventure. It was, in the words of Truman’s first press secretary, Jonathan Daniels, “the Odyssey of the ‘everyday’ American through our times. Truman was that ‘everyday man’; he remains his greatest symbol.”
Never had there been a president who looked and talked so much like the average voter. Truman had lived most of his life in obscurity—as a farmer, a soldier, a failed businessman, before destiny had intervened and placed him at the helm of the most powerful nation in the history of the world. “Hardly any other President has so personally shared all the vicissitudes of all the people,” according to Daniels. Truman walked among them, as one of them. He was fallible, he was blunt, and he exemplified humility. “Judging by his appearance,” recalled the reporter Robert Donovan, “he might have been an insurance salesman paying a call, or the family physician. As he drew nearer, the image changed from bland to crisp. The man who was nondescript from afar exuded a glow of vitality at closer range. The backs of his hands were covered with fine dark hairs, and when he shook hands his grip was strong.”
“He had a tremendous veneration and respect for the institution of the Presidency,” recalled George Elsey. “He didn’t demand any respect at all for Harry S. Truman; he demanded respect for the President of the United States . . . He was without any guile or any pretense. He was a politician. He was proud of his being a politician.
