Harry S. Truman’s memoir project

Harry S. Truman’s memoir project was an effort to put his consequential presidency on the historical record, but it became a test of what the record could preserve—and what collaboration could smooth away. Truman imagined the undertaking less as a personal story than as history. The resulting Memoirs of Harry S. Truman was extensive, carefully researched, and influential in renewing public interest in its author, yet its polished institutional voice often muted the vividness of Truman’s own expression.

From postponed task to working method

With the memoirs finally under way, alongside his efforts to establish his presidential library, Truman found himself busier than he had expected. He told Dean Acheson that the book was going well but had made a slave of him. The challenge was unfamiliar: Truman repeatedly insisted that he was not a writer, and the project would eventually involve a dozen people.

William Hillman and David Noyes, both former White House staff members, organized the first working process. They advised Truman while a paid staff of three worked in Room 1002 of the Federal Reserve Bank Building. The plan was for him to speak the book rather than write it. For months he answered questions for hours at a time into a recording machine supplied by Life, a device he disliked. Robert E. G. Harris, a University of Southern California journalism professor, conducted the interviews, while two young research assistants checked Truman’s recollections against the files.

By late fall, more than 100,000 words had been transcribed and arranged in looseleaf notebooks, but there was little that resembled a finished manuscript. Truman disliked what he read and scrawled “Good God, what crap!” across it. Harris was dismissed and Morton Royce took over the interviews. Royce pressed for fuller, more detailed answers, repeatedly returning to the same questions, especially about the atomic bomb. The method intended to capture Truman’s account thus also provoked his impatience: more questioning produced more material, but not necessarily a manuscript he felt was ready.

Facts before finish

The central standard Truman set was accuracy. When Ed Thompson visited in November and suggested that Life send Ernest Havemann to reshape and polish the growing manuscript, Truman declined at first. He wrote that facts mattered more to him at that stage than style or organization, because he wanted the record of his presidential years to be correct. He asked Thompson to delay sending Havemann—or anyone else—until that work was done.

Havemann arrived several weeks later and became the first experienced writer to work with Truman, although he did not actually write the book. The team worked six, sometimes seven, days a week. Truman reported to Acheson that the project was turning out much better than he had expected. Havemann nevertheless found Truman difficult to work with and the staff still more troublesome, and asked to be relieved after a month. At Doubleday’s request, Hawthorne Daniel was then recruited. Doubleday’s editor-in-chief, Ken McCormick, later joined the process of cutting and refining the material; Truman also asked Acheson and Sam Rosenman to review the accumulation. Acheson’s comments proved especially valuable.

Bess Wallace Truman’s contribution was less formal but, in McCormick’s view, consequential. He believed Truman’s judgment of the manuscript improved after their evening conversations at home, and later described her as his true North. Her role mattered within a process whose many advisers and editors helped make the work publishable, while also raising the possibility that Truman’s own voice would be diluted.

A manuscript too large for its contract

By early 1955, the manuscript had reached approximately two million words, although the contract called for only 300,000. Life agreed, after negotiations, to accept 580,000 words, but the project remained behind schedule. Hillman and Noyes spent more time in Kansas City cutting and trimming. Doubleday decided to publish the memoirs in two volumes. During the first half of 1955, the immediate task was to finish Volume One, which covered only the first sixteen months of the presidency, as well as Truman’s early life and two chapters on his political career before Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death.

As the deadline approached, work at the Federal Reserve Bank Building intensified; in the final days of June, some staff members worked around the clock. On July 4, 1955, Truman handed Thompson a 500,000-word manuscript in Kansas City. He remarked, “I never really appreciated before what is involved in trying to write a book.” The financial arrangement reflected the scale and duration of the work: Truman’s first check was for $110,000, accompanied by five promissory notes covering the balance of the $600,000 payment, with the final installment not due until January 1960.

Publication and the return of Truman

The memoirs reached readers first through Life. Its September 25 issue carried the opening installment, titled “The Most Momentous First 18 Days,” alongside a cover photograph of Truman and Bess Wallace Truman standing in front of their Independence home. Doubleday published Volume One, Year of Decisions, five weeks later. At the November 2, 1955, autographing party in the Muehlebach’s grand ballroom, more than three hundred people were already waiting before the event began. Truman had agreed to sign books, but resisted turning the occasion into an advertisement for the inexpensive fountain pens he planned to use—or for any other product.

Reviewers recognized the volume as a significant account of presidential life and praised its detail, its attention to presidential power, and Truman’s mixture of modesty and confidence. They also found too little autobiography and too much prose resembling an official document worked over by many hands. Eighteen letters to his mother offered a welcome glimpse of a more personal and distinctive voice, but reviewers missed the pungency and vitality of Truman’s own writing across much of the book. Their criticism identified a tension within the project itself: Truman had sought to preserve an accurate record, yet the collaborative process that shaped that record also made its author less audible.

Historical record and reputation

The critical judgment was not simply that the book lacked literary distinction. Reviewers could regard it as an important, conscientious work even while finding it less vivid than Truman’s letters or less accomplished as literature than other presidential and wartime histories. The volume’s aim, as Truman’s associates recalled it, was to make “my history,” not primarily to tell a personal memoir. That choice gave the project its documentary ambition and helps explain why official exposition could crowd out the individual voice readers wanted to hear.

The project’s effect extended beyond the books themselves. Volume Two appeared the following spring, and the memoirs and their serialization in Life generated renewed interest in Truman and a reconsideration of his presidency. The account also provoked protests and rebuttals from prominent participants, including Jimmy Byrnes and Henry Wallace. Yet publication marked the start of a sustained revival of Truman’s reputation and, in the book’s account, the opening of one of the happiest periods of his life. The memoirs therefore became both a record of presidential history and an instrument through which the former president’s public standing began to change.