Elbert Clifton Daniel Jr.

Elbert Clifton Daniel Jr. was an assistant foreign news editor at The New York Times when he became engaged to Margaret Truman Daniel. Their marriage made him Harry S. Truman’s son-in-law, a role the book presents not through political activity but through a carefully guarded courtship, a wedding watched by crowds and reporters, and a family relationship marked by consideration and restraint.

Background and Engagement

In mid-March 1956, Margaret announced her engagement at a press conference at the Carlyle Hotel in New York. Daniel was forty-two, ten years older than his fiancée, and the news surprised the public: although her parents had known about the relationship for several weeks, Margaret had kept the romance private. The episode places Daniel at the center of a transition in the Truman family, from the guarded private life of an only daughter to a marriage that immediately became a public story.

Margaret and Daniel had known each other for more than a year. He was described as slim, handsome, well dressed, and polished, with a trace of a British accent said to have been acquired during ten years as a foreign correspondent in England. The apparent sophistication of his public manner was balanced by a background not unlike Margaret’s: he had grown up in the small town of Zebulon, North Carolina, where his father ran a drugstore. The contrast between his international journalistic experience and small-town origins gave the book a compact portrait of a man whose outward polish did not mark him as a stranger to the kind of upbringing familiar to the Trumans.

Wedding in Independence

Daniel and Margaret married on Saturday, April 21, 1956, at Trinity Episcopal Church on Liberty Street in Independence. The church carried family history: it was the same church where Bess Wallace Truman and Harry S. Truman had married in 1919. The daughter’s wedding thus returned the family to the setting of her parents’ marriage, linking two generations through a familiar local place rather than a grand public venue.

A small reception followed at the bride’s home. In several respects it recalled the reception held there in 1919, but the circumstances outside had changed dramatically. This time, hundreds of reporters and photographers waited at the iron fence, while carloads of sightseers moved past the house bumper to bumper. The family’s gathering remained small, yet the attention around it made privacy difficult to preserve. The temperature was in the 80s; the shaded lawn was clipped and green, and spirea bloomed beside the porch. Margaret wore an ankle-length, full-skirted pale beige dress made from two-hundred-year-old Venetian lace.

Harry S. Truman arrived with Margaret by limousine and appeared unhappy and unsmiling during the ceremony. The account describes him as looking like a pitiable father of the bride; at the reception he brightened noticeably, perhaps helped by the bourbon suggested in a letter from his friend Dean Acheson. This detail gives Daniel’s wedding a second family dimension: the occasion was not only Margaret’s public entrance into married life but also a moment in which her father’s response was visible to the people around him.

Relationship with the Truman Family

Daniel’s later recollection presents a relationship with his father-in-law that was warm without being intrusive. He described Truman as an ideal father-in-law: considerate and never interfering. The contrast he drew between Truman’s public reputation as a combative political figure and his behavior at home suggests how sharply the family setting differed from the campaign stage and the presidency. Daniel’s account does not depict a household dominated by the former President’s public persona; instead, it emphasizes his restraint in the private role of a father-in-law.

The language used within the family also reflected the formality and generational conventions of their relationship. In public, Daniel addressed Truman as Mr. President. In private, after the birth of his first son, he called him Grandpa. He avoided Dad, which would have felt uncomfortable to both, and considered Harry an unthinkable form of address for their generations; Sir served as a practical alternative. These choices show Daniel negotiating closeness without assuming a familiar title that either man might have found awkward.

Family Life and Later Years

After Margaret and Daniel married, they had four sons. At Truman’s funeral in the courtyard of the Harry S. Truman Library, Daniel sat behind a green curtain with Bess Wallace Truman, Margaret, and the boys, screened from the invited guests. Their place behind the curtain preserved the family’s privacy during a public farewell, echoing the distinction that had marked the wedding: the Trumans’ domestic life drew intense attention, but the family remained gathered together apart from the larger audience.

The available account gives Daniel no separate political role and does not follow his work at the newspaper in detail. His significance here is relational. He entered the Truman family after a private courtship, married Margaret in the church where her parents had wed, and became part of the family life that continued after Truman left office. His recollections preserve an intimate counterpoint to the familiar public image of Truman: at home, Daniel remembered, the former President did not give the family the political version of himself.