Executive Mansion

The Executive Mansion mattered to Harry S. Truman as more than an address: it was the seat of power he had once struggled to enter, the home whose demands could isolate him from his family, and a national symbol he eventually helped save from collapse. Its rooms staged the abrupt transfer of the presidency, the making of decisions with consequences far beyond its walls, and Truman’s insistence that the dignity of the office be made visible. When structural failure forced the family out, reconstruction turned the building itself into one of the consequential projects of his presidency.

A difficult threshold

Before he lived there, the Executive Mansion represented access that Truman could not reliably obtain. On his first call, in February, the nervous senator found Harold Ickes, Henry Wallace, and other senior officials talking in the waiting room without noticing him. A meeting scheduled for fifteen minutes lasted seven; Truman remained tongue-tied before Franklin D. Roosevelt. He remembered the visit as a remarkable experience for a country boy, but access did not become easy with familiarity: in the months that followed, his calls to the President’s residence often went unanswered.

The slight took on a political edge as Truman’s Senate career developed. During the contest to choose a new majority leader, Roosevelt intervened on behalf of Alben Barkley with an open letter addressing him as the acting leader. Senator William H. Dieterich, initially pledged to Pat Harrison, changed sides after Chicago’s Boss Kelly promised him influence over the appointment of two federal judges. The day before the vote, the Executive Mansion reached Truman indirectly: Tom Pendergast had been asked to tell him how to vote, but received no offer of patronage to pass along. Truman refused to be moved. He was furious that the President’s people had gone through Pendergast rather than address him as a senator, and complained to press secretary Steve Early that he was tired of being pushed around like an office boy. The episode made the residence’s political reach felt even as it confirmed Truman’s sense that its occupants did not treat him with the consideration his office warranted.

That disregard was sharpened by the contrast with Lloyd C. Stark. Truman had arranged Stark’s first meeting with Franklin D. Roosevelt and urged the President to invite Stark and his wife aboard the campaign train as it traveled through Missouri. Later, as governor, Stark visited the Executive Mansion frequently, called Roosevelt the Chief, and joined poker parties aboard the presidential yacht. Truman, by contrast, could have difficulty getting the President’s secretary to return a call. The house thus represented not only a formal center of government but a social circle from which Truman could be excluded, even when he had helped bring its favored guests inside.

The rooms of succession and government

That distance collapsed on April 12, 1945, when Truman became President after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death. In Eleanor Roosevelt’s private sitting room, she stepped forward and put an arm gently on his shoulder. Truman and his advisers agreed that the Cabinet should assemble and the Chief Justice be summoned to administer the oath. From the President’s office, Truman called for congressional leaders and for a car to bring Bess Wallace Truman and Margaret Truman Daniel; only then did he telephone his wife and tell her what had happened. She had not heard the news on the radio.

By evening, the Cabinet Room held a crowded assembly of officials, legislators, military leaders, and advisers. Uniformed guards stood at the doors. Truman and Chief Justice Harlan Stone took their places beside the marble mantelpiece beneath a portrait of Woodrow Wilson, while Bess Wallace Truman and Margaret Truman Daniel joined the gathering. Reporters and newsreel cameramen were admitted amid the milling and confusion. At 7:09, two hours and twenty-four minutes after Roosevelt’s death, Truman took the oath. His sharp features were taut behind thick, round glasses; at the end of the brief ceremony, he kissed the Bible with sudden fervor. He then asked the Cabinet to remain. The residence had become, in a matter of hours, the setting for both a private shock and a public constitutional transfer.

The President’s office preserved the sense of an absent predecessor. Its furniture stood as Franklin D. Roosevelt had left it; ship models and naval prints remained on the apple-green walls. Jonathan Daniels had cleared the desk of its pictures and knickknacks, but the room still seemed to belong to Roosevelt. Truman sat in the high-backed leather chair, rolling it back and forth, turning and leaning back as if testing the place he had inherited. The room’s furnishings made succession tangible: the desk had been cleared, yet the space retained its former occupant’s presence. Truman’s first major test came in his address to Congress on April 16. Despite beginning before he was supposed to, he won a favorable response from Congress, the press, and the public.

His first weeks also exposed the distinction between inheriting the rooms and remaking the administration. Senior Roosevelt aides, including Sam Rosenman, Eben Ayers, David Niles, and Bill Hassett, had considered leaving, but stayed when Truman asked them to. At a major Oval Office meeting on April 23, however, the participants were entirely Roosevelt’s people: the group Franklin D. Roosevelt would have assembled, with no representative from Truman’s former Senate staff, no Missouri political allies, and no foreign-policy adviser of Truman’s own choosing. The setting displayed continuity in personnel as well as in furniture. Truman occupied the office, but the people and practices around him were initially inherited.

A residence and a working presidency

The Executive Mansion’s domestic rooms could not be separated from the pressures of governing. During his first months there, Truman and Bess Wallace Truman relaxed with a cocktail in the sitting hall before dinner, though the staff needed time to learn what they liked. Yet the family’s experience of the residence was unsettled. On June 2, less than a month after moving in, Bess, her mother, and Margaret Truman Daniel left Washington by train for a long summer in Independence. Neither Bess nor her mother was happy with life in the house. Margaret’s emphatic note about being on the way home conveyed her own displeasure, and Truman privately worried that his presidency might affect his daughter adversely.

After only a few nights alone, Truman felt desolate. On the first Sunday, without announcing his plan, he walked across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church and sat unnoticed in a back pew. He noted in his diary that only a handful of people recognized him. The episode offers a counterpoint to the formal visibility of the presidency: the man who occupied the country’s most recognizable residence could still seek an unobserved place nearby. His private letters could sound woeful, but the mood of the working day was often different. A Gallup poll reported that 87 percent of the public approved his conduct of the presidency, a rating higher than Franklin D. Roosevelt had received. Eben Ayers observed that Truman was in good humor, and Truman took encouragement from his standing on Capitol Hill, his press conferences, and his staff.

The residence also became a practical command center. When Truman decided how to respond to the Berlin blockade, his staff had no direct role in making or carrying out the airlift decisions. He did not consult them or his political advisers, and he made no effort to promise them that the airlift would succeed. Instead, he made clear his intention to remain in Berlin. In other crises, the rooms brought officials together to weigh choices. The Cabinet Room hosted a November 1950 National Security Council meeting at which Truman presided over the decision not to let the crisis in Korea expand into a world war. On another occasion, a meeting with congressional leaders and senior officials ended with support for sending American air and naval forces to aid South Korea; Charlie Ross then delivered the announcement to reporters gathered in the lobby.

The house also accommodated new forms of presidential visibility. A console DuMont television set, with a twelve-inch screen, was installed in Truman’s office so that he could follow proceedings from his chair. When cameras were set up in the press room for an NBC broadcast, Truman and his staff gathered around the set to watch. In the same building, he could receive more than forty officials and legislators for a consequential meeting, or take a quiet interest in a mechanism outside it. On an evening walk, he descended the iron steps of the Memorial Bridge to inspect the machinery that raised and lowered its central span. He found the bridge tender eating supper from a tin bucket; the man greeted him by saying he had just been thinking about the President. Truman treasured the encounter. The nearby residence supplied a base from which he could move between the machinery of state and contact with an individual worker.

The building’s decline

For Truman, the Executive Mansion was never simply a comfortable home. He had called it the great white jail, the great white sepulcher of ambitions, and the taxpayers’ house; he found life there difficult and often lonely. At the same time, he and Bess Wallace Truman restored state dinners and receptions in its formal rooms after the war, attending closely to tradition. The pageantry gave him pleasure, while the building’s public significance gave that tradition a purpose beyond ceremony. Presidential furnishings and conveyances—the yacht, plane, railroad car, and limousines—represented the dignity of the office. The residence was the largest and most enduring of these symbols.

In 1948, the building’s physical deterioration became impossible to treat as a private inconvenience. Margaret Truman Daniel’s sitting-room floor gave way beneath her piano, though it did not fall through the family dining-room ceiling. Workers propped it up and repaired it. Truman was told that his own bathroom was close to collapsing into the Red Parlor, and that he should not sleep in his bedroom or use the bath. He moved instead to the Lincoln Bedroom, sleeping in Abraham Lincoln’s bed, which he found comfortable. The family kept the danger from public view until after the election; Margaret later recalled the fear that the story would be blamed on her father. The concealed damage contrasted with the building’s reassuring exterior and the public image it was expected to sustain.

After the election, the full danger was disclosed. The Executive Mansion was judged so unsafe that it might collapse at any moment, and it was closed to visitors. The President, Bess Wallace Truman, and Margaret Truman Daniel went to Key West while the family’s temporary residence was prepared at Blair House, at 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue. The West Wing, built by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, remained sound. Truman therefore resumed the walk across the street to the Oval Office, as he had in the first weeks after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death. Secret Service agents flanked him, traffic stopped, and tourists watched. When a car with Virginia plates nearly struck him, its driver stopped abruptly, but Truman continued on without appearing concerned. The daily crossing made displacement visible: the President still went to work in the same office, but no longer slept in the house that gave the office its familiar setting.

Reconstruction and return

The renovation revealed how precarious the residence had become. Although its exterior sandstone walls, roof, and fire-resistant third floor were stable, the structure below was badly compromised. Heavy loads weighed on interior bearing walls; beams had been cut or notched for plumbing and wiring; much of the second floor, rebuilt after British soldiers burned the house in 1814, was unsafe. Plumbing was makeshift and outdated, while heating and electrical systems were inadequate. The Commissioner of Public Buildings described the structural weaknesses as appalling, and the architect Lorenzo Winslow believed he could demonstrate that the house could not remain standing.

Truman took an intense interest in the work and wanted the restoration to last for generations. The project began with careful removal of the interior, followed by demolition until the house was a hollow shell: the old outside walls were held in place by steel framing while trucks and bulldozers excavated two new basement levels. Truman enjoyed inspection tours, sometimes walking along workers’ catwalks high above the ground. His own principal design intervention was the grand stairway. He insisted that it be moved to the east side of the main entrance hall and opened up so that presidential processions and honored guests would have a more suitable ceremonial route. The change joined practical reconstruction to the formal use of the house.

After three years and four months away, Truman returned to the Executive Mansion, visibly pleased. He and Bess Wallace Truman looked over the East Room, Green Room, Blue Room, Red Room, and State Dining Room, as well as the hall and state stairway. The work had cost $5,832,000. Truman thought it could have been completed for less and more quickly had he been fully in charge, but he was satisfied with the result. Architects and engineers told him the rebuilt house should last five hundred years; he hoped for a thousand. The restoration answered the building’s immediate structural crisis, but it also enacted Truman’s belief that the presidential residence embodied an office larger than its temporary occupants. His return to a house remade from within brought the physical seat of the presidency back into service while preserving the exterior through which the nation recognized it.