TRU Blog

TRU Blog

Creation of NATO | March 18, 2024

Address on the Occasion of the Signing of the North Atlantic Treaty: April 4, 1949

On April 4, 1949, the U.S. entered into its first peacetime military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty. After Secretary of State Dean Acheson signed the treaty, President Truman addressed the crowd. “In this pact, we hope to create a shield against aggression and the fear of aggression–a bulwark which will permit us to get on with the real business of government and society, the business of achieving a fuller and happier life for all our citizens.”

Read on for more from President Truman’s address after the North Atlantic Treaty was signed.

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Creation of NATO

Why I’m Wild About Harry | March 6, 2024

A Q&A with Washington Post Columnist David Von Drehle

KANSAS CITIANS ARE WILD ABOUT HARRY, perhaps none more so than David Von Drehle. A journalist, New York Times best-selling author, and lifelong history enthusiast, Von Drehle initially became involved with the Truman Library and Truman Library Institute more than a decade ago. Now, he is serving as Honorary Chair for the 25th annual Wild About Harry gala, a night celebrating the legacy of Harry Truman while raising vital funds for civics education at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum.

Von Drehle’s journalistic career has covered everything from history to politics, triumphs, and tragedies. He understands the importance of making sense of our present to find hope for our future. He found that hope in Truman’s life and legacy, and at his presidential library, where young people, especially, are inspired and prepared to become involved in public service.

You’ve spent your career writing extensively about history and politics—what about Harry Truman inspires you?

Truman is, I believe, one of the most important and sometimes undervalued presidents in American history. In the post-World War Two era, it was really his job to rebuild Western Europe and Japan and to create a set of institutions on the international stage that would prevent another catastrophe. We still live in the world Truman created 75 years later, with NATO, the United Nations, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and all sorts of systems of stability that we have come to take for granted. It’s more important than ever to help people understand why we have this world and why we would be crazy to destroy it.

As a longtime champion of the Truman Library and now Honorary Chair of the 25th Wild About Harry event, what draws you to its mission?

It’s easy to look at the things that are going wrong and decide that the world’s going to hell in a handbasket. But with all the challenges we face, we live in a better world than existed in 1945. Truman’s decisions to advance civil rights by desegregating the US military and the federal workforce have led to a much more equal, free, and open society than existed before.

The Institute is also telling Harry Truman’s personal story. He was a person born into pretty modest means; he was never able to go to college, but he educated himself. He was a tremendous reader who believed in himself, didn’t give up when he failed, and managed to make himself one of the most important Americans in our history. That’s an important story to tell to young people who need to understand their own potential.

David Von Drehle on stage with Doris Kearns Goodwin (Wild About Harry 2023)
 

There are so many worthy causes to support in Kansas City. Why is supporting Wild About Harry important to you?

The Kansas City community is so incredibly generous. One of the things I love about living here is that people take the idea of philanthropy very seriously and support causes from Harvesters to education, to the arts and our great museums. Supporting the Truman Library is meaningful to me because it connects Kansas City to the nation and, frankly, to the world. I love the story it tells of potential.

We have to figure out more and better ways to help our young people understand what opportunities lay before them and to give them hope. So many messages young people are hearing today are hopeless and depressing. Our mission at Truman, which Wild About Harry supports, is about giving them a different message. It’s not a Pollyanna message, but it’s a hopeful message. America has seen problems before, and we’ve managed to face them being led by ordinary people who are doing their best. That’s what Harry Truman represents to me.

President Truman’s mission for his presidential library was clear. “He didn’t want the Truman Library to be a monument to him as a person,” Von Drehle says. “He wanted it to be an educational institution that would help young people understand American history, American government, and the role of the presidency. We don’t have to go looking for our mission; we just need to carry it out.”

Wild About Harry is on April 18, 2024. Find more information HERE.

Why I’m Wild About Harry

First Family Stories: Margaret and Jack | February 16, 2024

First Family Stories

By Clifton Truman Daniel

“Margaret and Jack”

MY MOTHER, Margaret Truman Daniel, wasn’t much impressed by politics and politicians.

This was almost certainly a case of familiarity breeding contempt. Titles and position meant little to her, even when she was sitting in the White House.

During the early 1950s, while she pursued a singing career in New York, Mom kept an apartment at the Carlyle Hotel at the corner of Madison and 76th. My grandparents stayed there a few times, as well.

When Mom married Dad in 1956, the newlyweds bought an apartment a whole block east, at 76th and Park. The living room windows faced 76th Street. If you put your face near the glass and looked west, you could easily see the front door of the hotel.

On a visit to New York early in his presidency, John F. Kennedy stayed at the Carlyle. According to Mom, she recommended it. Parked out front during his stay was the phalanx of large
motorcycles that accompanied the presidential motorcade.

One warm afternoon, Mom was sitting in the living room, reading, with the window open to the breeze. Down the block, President Kennedy prepared to leave for an appointment. He was notorious for running behind. Still, the Secret Service agents riding Kennedy’s motorcycles were duty bound to start their engines, lest they get caught flat-footed by the president’s eventual departure.

The roar carried up the block and into our living room. Mom got up, closed the window, and sat back down. The din continued. Five minutes. Ten. Fifteen. Mom got up again, went into
the den and picked up the phone.

“Good morning. Carlyle Hotel. How may I direct your call?”

“Good morning. This is Margaret Truman. I’d like to speak to President Kennedy, please.”

“Certainly. Please hold.”

(Insert hold music and muted expressions of incredulity here.)

“Good morning, Margaret,” President Kennedy said, coming on the line. “How are you?”

“Jack,” Mom said. “Leave already or tell them to turn off the damn motorcycles.”

She hung up and walked back to the living room. Before she sat down, the roar subsided.


Clifton Truman Daniel is the eldest grandson of President Harry S. Truman and his wife, Bess. He is the son of author Margaret Truman and former New York Times Managing Editor E. Clifton Daniel, Jr. Mr. Daniel is honorary chairman of the board of the Truman Library Institute, board secretary of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, and vice president of the Society of Presidential Descendants. He is the author of Growing Up with My Grandfather: Memories of Harry S. Truman and Dear Harry, Love Bess: Bess Truman’s Letters to Harry Truman, 1919-1943. In addition to portraying his famous grandfather on stage, Mr. Daniel gives a series of lectures on various aspects of the Truman presidency and U.S. and White House history. Learn more.

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First Family Stories: Margaret and Jack

A Unique Privilege | February 16, 2024

Margaret Truman in the White House

By Natalie Alms

On June 11, 1945, nearly two months into his presidency, Harry Truman wrote to his daughter Margaret: “you evidently are just finding out what a terrible situation the President’s daughter is facing … so you must face it. Keep your balance and go along just as your dad is trying to go.”

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A Unique Privilege

Historic Speeches | January 5, 2024

President Truman’s “Fair Deal” Speech

On January 5, 1949, President Harry S. Truman announced, in his State of the Union address, that every American has a right to expect from our government a fair deal. Truman’s “Fair Deal” was an ambitious set of proposals put forward by U.S. President Harry S. Truman to Congress in his January 1949 State of the Union address. This single historic speech encapsulates the entire domestic agenda of the Truman administration, from 1945 to 1953.

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Historic Speeches

Fall 2023 Research Grants Announced | December 2, 2023

The Truman Library Institute is pleased to announce the awardees of its Fall 2023 Research Grants. Grants of up to $2,500 are awarded twice annually to offset the cost of conducting research at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum.

This grant cycle will assist scholars advancing research on such topics as American intelligence, the U.S. Armed Forces, the history of humanitarian aid, foreign policy, national security and our American political system.

Together, these grants will ultimately help deepen the public understanding of our critical past and serve to illuminate issues of national and global significance today and in the years to come. Read More

First Family Stories: Remembering Rosalynn Carter | November 21, 2023

First Family Stories

By Clifton Truman Daniel

“Remembering Rosalynn Carter”

I DID NOT KNOW ROSALYNN CARTER WELL. We met only once, in 2019, when I was invited to give a talk during the annual meeting of the Carter Political Items Collectors in Plains, Georgia. Even so, I felt her presence throughout the town.

Plains, her home, to which she and Jimmy Carter returned after leaving the White House, was—and is—so small that Lillian Carter, Rosalynn’s future mother-in-law, helped deliver her on the day she was born. Years later, when Jimmy Carter first asked her on a date, she turned him down. Then she “ran around with everyone else in Plains,” as he put it, before accepting his invitation.

Running around with everyone else in Plains turned out to be going on one date with one guy.

During my visit, residents and visitors alike needed nothing more than a smile to begin talking about the Carters. They pointed out that the couple’s Secret Service vehicle was a pickup truck, that they sometimes arrived at events in dusty jeans, or that Jan Williams, Lillian Carter’s former secretary and Amy Carter’s former teacher, could fix President Carter’s hair by licking her palm and smooshing it down.

Historian Larry Cook, who had known the Carters for two decades, said when he was with them he often forgot he was talking to a former president and first lady.

Their grandson, James Earl Carter IV, paid Rosalynn Carter the ultimate compliment, calling her a “regular grandmother” who put his needs before her own and called often to check on him when he was going through a rough patch.

Her strength was in her belief in empathy and kindness, that power and position were to be used solely for the benefit of others. Wealth and fame were hollow and fleeting. Yet she was richer than most.

As my grandfather said, “Good name and honor are worth more than all the gold and jewels ever mined.”

Photo description: Rosalynn Carter (front row) with Nancy Reagan (second from left) and Betty Ford (right) at my grandmother’s grave site service at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum


Clifton Truman Daniel is the eldest grandson of President Harry S. Truman and his wife, Bess. He is the son of author Margaret Truman and former New York Times Managing Editor E. Clifton Daniel, Jr. Mr. Daniel is honorary chairman of the board of the Truman Library Institute, board secretary of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, and vice president of the Society of Presidential Descendants. He is the author of Growing Up with My Grandfather: Memories of Harry S. Truman and Dear Harry, Love Bess: Bess Truman’s Letters to Harry Truman, 1919-1943. In addition to portraying his famous grandfather on stage, Mr. Daniel gives a series of lectures on various aspects of the Truman presidency and U.S. and White House history. Learn more.

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First Family Stories: Remembering Rosalynn Carter

First Family Stories: Truman Defeats Dewey | November 1, 2023

First Family Stories

By Clifton Truman Daniel

“Truman Defeats Dewey”

THE FIRST STORY my mother told me about the 1948 presidential campaign had nothing to do with tactics, crowds, or the upset victory.

The Ferdinand Magellan presidential railcar was outfitted with a speedometer connected to the engine, so folks in back could see how fast they were going. Mom and Grandpa were in the lounge one afternoon, reading, when Mom noticed Grandpa glancing up repeatedly at the speedometer, which was climbing. 80. 82. 85 . . .  Finally, he said to an aide, “Tell the engineer to slow down.”

In addition to the speedometer, the Magellan boasted armor plate, bullet-resistant windows, and bank vault-style doors. The car weighed 285,000 pounds, making it the heaviest rail car ever used in the US. Kim Jong Un would be jealous. Grandpa’s fear was that if the engineer had to break suddenly while going 85 miles per hour, the Magellan would plow through the rest of the train.

Meanwhile, Grandpa was hoping to plow through Tom Dewey.

Given little chance of success, what with Dewey’s popularity and fractures within his own party, he nevertheless felt that if he could take his case to the people, he had a shot. He traveled some 31,000 miles, giving about 350 speeches, almost all of them from the Magellan’s rear platform. He and his aides developed a strategy of tailoring each address to the needs of the local audience while hammering the “do nothing” 80th Republican Congress and its platform.

“Down by the Station” by Jim Berryman (September 22, 1948)

“They think the American standard of living is a fine thing, so long as it doesn’t spread to all the people,” he’d rail. “And they admire the government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it.”

He came across as what he was—straightforward, approachable, and determined. Voters loved it. Grandpa, not so much. He was good, but giving speeches was not his favorite thing. He likened his feelings to those of the man who was on his way to his wife’s funeral. The funeral director asked him if he wouldn’t mind riding in the same car as his mother-in-law.

“I’ll do it,” the man said. “But it’s going to ruin my whole day.”

Grandpa, my grandmother, and my mother were pretty much the only ones who thought he could win. And they could be prickly about it.

During the campaign, New York Times photographer George Tames was snapping photos of my mother as she walked from the Hay Adams Hotel to a waiting limousine. Being a gentleman, he put aside his camera and held the car door for her.

Margaret Truman is surrounded by reporters as she holds a press conference on the train returning President Harry S. Truman and family to Kansas City after a presidential campaign trip to the West Coast. (June 16, 1948)

“It doesn’t look very good for your dad,” he said. Mom, who’d been smiling, scowled, said, “You have no faith,” and slammed the door in his face.

Col. Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune and a card-carrying Truman hater, had faith . . . that Grandpa was going to lose.

He was so convinced that when the early returns came in favoring Dewey, he printed and distributed 10,000 copies of the paper with the headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Later, when the scales clearly started tipping the other way, he flipped out and ordered every Tribune employee with a pulse to go out retrieve the embarrassing copies. Reporter Bob Wiedrich remembered walking home in the wee hours of that morning and watching a fierce tug of war between a Tribune driver and a newsstand owner over a stack of those papers. The newsstand owner won.

When I was in eighth grade, I discovered that Mr. Dewey’s grandsons had enrolled in the same school. I considered walking downstairs and marching past their classrooms going, “Woo, woo! All aboard!”

 

Photos courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum


Clifton Truman Daniel is the eldest grandson of President Harry S. Truman and his wife, Bess. He is the son of author Margaret Truman and former New York Times Managing Editor E. Clifton Daniel, Jr. Mr. Daniel is honorary chairman of the board of the Truman Library Institute, board secretary of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, and vice president of the Society of Presidential Descendants. He is the author of Growing Up with My Grandfather: Memories of Harry S. Truman and Dear Harry, Love Bess: Bess Truman’s Letters to Harry Truman, 1919-1943. In addition to portraying his famous grandfather on stage, Mr. Daniel gives a series of lectures on various aspects of the Truman presidency and U.S. and White House history. Learn more.

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First Family Stories: Truman Defeats Dewey

Truman and the Birth of Israel | May 14, 2023

On May 11, 2023, The Honorable Michael Herzog, Israel ambassador to the U.S., visited the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of President Truman’s politically courageous decision to recognize the nascent state of Israel. A transcript of his remarks follows. Watch the recorded program, in its entirety, on YouTube. Read More

Truman and the Birth of Israel