Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip Read Online Free PDF Page A

silver dollars poured in by the dozens. Truman estimated that less than one-half of one percent of the letters came from “crackpots,” a statistic that surprised him. “I expected more,” he said. “I had many chances to make people mad.”
    He answered each and every piece of mail because, he said, “I have always believed that if a person goes to the trouble of writing a letter, even a critical letter, I should answer or at least acknowledge it.” The postage was, of course, solely his responsibility. At three cents a pop, it would cost him nearly ten thousand dollars in just his first year out of office.
    Truman maintained an open-door policy, and just about anybody who dropped by was likely to get an audience with the former president. “Many people,” he said, “feel that a president or an ex-president is partly theirs—and they are right to some extent—and that they have a right to call upon him.” His office number was even listed in the Kansas City telephone directory: Baltimore 6150. (His home number was unlisted, probably in deference to Bess.)
    When he wasn’t answering mail, entertaining uninvited visitors, or taking unsolicited telephone calls, Truman was busy raising money—not for himself but for the grand library he planned to build on the family farm in Grandview. The library would serve as a repository for his papers, which, for the time being, were stored in four hundred four-drawer filing cabinets in a room on the fourth floor of the Jackson County Courthouse.
    With his keen sense of history, Truman well understood the importance of preserving his papers. “Did you know that Millard Fillmore’s son burned some of his papers?” he asked an interviewer. “A good many of Jackson’s papers were lost—some were found again, but a good many were lost…. Lincoln’s son burned some of his papers. Think of it, some of Abraham Lincoln’s papers burned! It’s awful.”
    Truman envisioned the library as a “research center for the benefit of small colleges” in the Midwest. He wasn’t interested in a memorial to himself, he insisted. “I’ll be cussed and discussed for the next generation anyway.” Besides, Truman didn’t think much of memorials to the living. “You can never tell what foolishness they may get into before they get into a pine box and then the memorial sometimes has to be torn down.”
    A private corporation called the Harry S. Truman Library, Inc., had been established to raise money for the project—money that could not be used for Truman’s personal or business expenses.
    Around four o’clock he would go home. After dinner, he listened to a newscast or two on the radio. Then he retired to the reading room, where he indulged his passion for history. By ten o’clock he was in bed.
    It was, in many respects, a perfectly ordinary life.
    Truman, however, still needed money. He was, he wrote, under a “heavy burden of personal expense.” He could have solved his financial problems overnight by accepting one of the many lucrative offers that came his way. A chain of clothing stores offered him a job for a hundred thousand dollars a year as a “sales manager.” Another firm offered him an eight-year, eight-hundred-thousand-dollar contract requiring him to “work” just one hour a day. A sewing machine company offered him “a salary in six figures” for doing nothing more than making occasional public appearances. There were lucrative offers to appear on a radio program, or to put his name on a brand of soap. Truman refused them all. He would do nothing that would “commercialize” the presidency, he said, nothing that would exploit or trivialize the office in any way.
    Occasionally he accepted modest fees for giving speeches, which he donated to his library fund. Beyond that, he refused to cash in on his status as a former president. It was a principle that future ex-presidents would abandon.
    In early February, just a few weeks after leaving office, it was