Doubleday

Doubleday was the publisher of the first volume of Harry S. Truman’s memoirs, turning a sprawling record of his presidency into a major book release. Its role extended beyond printing: at the publisher’s request, an experienced writer joined the editorial work, and Doubleday’s editor-in-chief later helped refine the manuscript. The launch combined a public-facing book campaign with Truman’s personal insistence on accuracy and hands-on participation.

Editorial Work on a Vast Manuscript

By late 1954, the memoir’s raw material had grown beyond manageable limits, though the manuscript was still unfinished. Truman resisted a proposal to bring in Life staff writer Ernest Havemann to reshape and polish it. He told Ed Thompson that getting the facts right mattered more to him than style or organization, and asked that no one else be sent until that work was complete.

Havemann began working with Truman several weeks later. He did not write the book, but helped with the process and worked alongside the staff at an intense pace—sometimes six or seven days a week. After about a month, he asked to be relieved. Doubleday then recruited another writer, Hawthorne Daniel, and its editor-in-chief, Ken McCormick, joined the cutting and refining. Truman also asked Dean Acheson and Samuel Rosenman to review the accumulated manuscript. Acheson urged Truman to favor personal experience and ideas over lists of White House callers and committee activities, and criticized some passages as brusque, didactic, or superficial. This editorial exchange made Doubleday part of a collaborative process in which Truman’s demand for a correct record met the practical need to shape a publishable book.

Publication and Public Launch

Truman handed Thompson a 500,000-word manuscript in Kansas City on July 4, 1955. The first installment, titled The Most Momentous First 18 Days, appeared in Life on September 25. Doubleday followed five weeks later with the first volume, Year of Decisions. The publication was celebrated at an autographing party in the grand ballroom of the Muehlebach on November 2, 1955.

Doubleday’s advertising manager, Samuel Vaughan, worried that local readers might see little reason to attend an event for a former president they encountered regularly. He tried to ensure a crowd by contacting Battery D veterans and Boy Scouts, among others. The concern proved unnecessary: more than three hundred people were already waiting before the party began. Truman had agreed to sign for everyone, but refused to let Doubleday turn his inexpensive fountain pens into an advertising gimmick. He preferred to sign the books himself rather than use a machine, and kept greeting readers as he worked. He signed more than a thousand copies in the first session and four thousand in five and a half hours, at a rate that reached six to eight signatures a minute.

Publication Terms and Reception

The memoir brought Truman substantial payment: his first check was for $110,000, with five promissory notes covering the remainder of a total $600,000, the final installment due in January 1960. The scale of the manuscript and the payment arrangement underscore that Doubleday’s publication was both a literary undertaking and a major commercial project.

Reviewers treated the first volume as an important account of presidential politics, praising its detail, clarity, and treatment of presidential power. Some, however, thought it contained too little autobiography and too much that resembled an official paper revised by many hands. Truman acknowledged in the preface that he had received help. Richard Rovere particularly missed the sharper personal voice evident in Truman’s letters to his mother, eighteen of which appeared in the book. Doubleday’s achievement therefore carried a tension visible in the reception: editorial collaboration made an extensive political record available to readers, while also raising the question of how much of Truman’s individual voice had survived the process.