Library At Independence THE “BUCK” STOPPED AT THE PRESIDENT'S DESK

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30641, 6 January 1965, Page 8

Library At Independence THE “BUCK” STOPPED AT THE PRESIDENT'S DESK

IB» DENIS BROGAN in the "Guardian," Manchester! (Reprinted bp orranpementl

Independence, Missouri, until 1945, had two claims to historical importance, to offset the pride of its over-weening neighbour, Kansas City (Missouri). It had been one of the main jumping-off grounds of the pioneers moving West, “across the wide Missouri,” and it was the Mormon New Jerusalem.

But in 1945 Independence suddenly acquired a new importance, for it was the home of the Senator from Missouri whom Franklin D. Roosevelt had chosen as his Vice-President, who served nearly eight years in the White House, and who had to make, and made —and has not repented—the dread decision to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima. That would be fame enough, but President Truman had to make many more decisions; to refuse to give up Berlin, to give the South Koreans not merely “aid” but help; to send General Eisenhower as com-mander-in-chief of N.A.T.O. and so open the way to the White House. Legend For Courage The “Man of Independence,” as an admirer rightly called him, became a great world figure and, in his lifetime, became a legend for courage and outspokenness and for an attitude expressed in the motto he put on his White House desk: “the buck stops here.” So it was a world figure who returned to his home town, to his agreeable middle-class house like one that would have made a good setting for a novel by W. D. Howells or Ruth Suckow. And there has been built the shrine to his fame, for that is what the Truman Library is. There, since he left the White House, “the President,” as he is always called in his home town (this prophet has honour), has worked on his memoirs, on the vast accumulation of his papers, on his collected speeches, and has become the Grand Old Man of American politics whose sometimes reckless candour has endeared him to his friends and often intimidated his enemies. I had not seen Mr Truman since the Democratic Convention at Chicago in 1956. Although I was to be in Kansas City, I was diffident about asking for an interview with a man of 80 who had just broken two ribs, even though he had briskly left hospital without his medical attendants’ consent and had resumed working, writing, receiving, commenting. Pilgrims’ Shrine The Library is a fairly large, elegant, modern one-storey building which is a library, a museum, a centre of historical research, and what Hawarden was to good Liberals

[7O years ago. Pilgrims come, old and young, old friends come—and new friends, for one of Mr Truman’s happiest memories is his late but close and admiring friendship with Herbert Hoover. Americans are accused of having no sense of reverence or of history, but the Truman Library and other shrines show how wrong this is. On my morning there, the visitors included a large, well-behaved but vivacious group of high school boys and girls and a large solemn group of what in America are called “girls”: we should politely call them matrons of uncertain age. And I was told that “the President” sometimes gets brusque and brief with adults, but will put up with any amount of questioning from the schoolboys and schoolgirls. For Mr Truman is convinced that Americans don’t know enough, are not taught enough about history, especially their own history, and he believes deeply that history is a tea-

cher of wisdom. So are relics. There is furniture from the White House and rotted beams that nearly let the White House collapse when the Truman family were there and drove them across the street to Blair House, where the famous attempt was made on the President’s life. Needless to say, he walked to the sound of firing and had one of the narrowest of escapes: one of his guards was killed and the Puerto Ricans" would have got me if they had been sober.” But, as was said by a soldier of General Grant: “Ulysses don’t scare easy.” Neither does or did Captain Truman.

Mr Truman was Captain Truman before he was Senator or President. There is a French “seventy-five” in the Library, but “not one of the guns from my battery; I know all the numbers of those guns.” And one of his staff told me that he thought his chief was prouder of having commanded his battery in action than of having been President. There are relics of the Civil

War. too, and Captain Truman has obviously a great admiration for General Lee, the great soldier of "the war between the States,” for I heard Mr Truman use this Confederate title and I remembered his Confederate ancestry. Did not his grandmother debar him from her house when he came wearing the uniform of the army of the victorious North?

Mr Truman’s Riva! Then there is the fresco painted by Mr Truptan’s friend and neighbour in Kansas City, Thomas Hart Benton, collateral descendant of the great senator who is Mr Truman’s only rival in Missouri hagiography (and whose direct descendants, oddly enough, live in Auvergne). But the man Is more than the shrine. He had not notably aged since I had seen him last, eight years before; his eyes were as bright, his voice as warm and full as ever, and as unhesitating. He had not broken his ribs in his bath but while arranging his bathroom cupboard and “I got the biggest black eye since Bob Fitzsimmons.” thus happily recalling the greatest Cornishman of modern times. He recalled other people. His admiration for Sir Winston. Churchill, “the greatest man of the century,” for his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, for good Democrats like President Johnson, was unfeigned It extended to Mr Hoover if not to all eminent Republicans and. doubtless remembering how his own unprecedented victory in 1948 had filled Senator Goldwater’s camp with fallacious hopes, he thought the Goldwater campaign of 1964 the worst run he had ever seen. A Good Jacksonian So with grave courtesy he took us slowly to the door, apologising for his accidental lameness, and returned to the desk he had brought from the White House. Outside, the silent, and efficient, officials of the National Archives (which runs the Library) were at work; so were the Ph.D. candidates: so were the pilgrims. There are other libraries of this type. Mr Hoover had two, one in lowa, one at Stanford University. There is the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, the Eisenhower Library at Abilene. But F.D.R. was dead before his library was built, Mr Hoover died in New York, and General Eisenhower is not supposed to be much of a “rat de bibliotheque.” It was of none of these that I was reminded but of John Quincy Adams in “the old house” at Quincy. John Quincy was an unreconstructed Yankee but I am sure that even a good Jacksonian Democrat like Mr Truman will not be affronted by the comparison.