Memoirs of Harry S. Truman

Memoirs of Harry S. Truman was the former president’s sustained attempt to put his own account of his life and presidency into print. What began as a delayed undertaking became a vast, collaborative project: the manuscript reached roughly two million words before it was cut back, and its publication in Life and as a two-volume book brought Truman’s record back into public discussion. The memoirs were more than a book contract fulfilled; they marked the beginning of a happier period for Truman and a steady revival of his reputation.

A demanding project

Truman had put off the memoirs, but once work began he discovered how much of his time they would require. In the fall, he told Dean Acheson, “The book is doing fine but what a slave it’s made of me.” The undertaking also competed with his work to establish his presidential library, and its financial arrangement added pressure: his $600,000 payment from Life was not due until he delivered the finished manuscript.

The project was ambitious by the standards of presidential autobiography. Before Truman, Herbert Hoover was the only former president to have published his own story during his lifetime. John Quincy Adams and James K. Polk had left extensive private diaries, while Ulysses S. Grant wrote his memoirs near the end of his life to provide for his family, without recounting his years in the White House. Theodore Roosevelt’s autobiography treated his presidency superficially, and Truman knew that readers would compare his work with Winston Churchill’s history of the Second World War. Truman repeatedly insisted, “I’m not a writer!” The complaint reflected, in the account of the project, the central difficulty: turning a life of public decisions into a manuscript.

How the manuscript was made

William Hillman and David Noyes, both former White House staff members, organized the initial process and promised to protect Truman from the publisher. A paid staff of three worked in Room 1002 of the Federal Reserve Bank Building, a floor below Truman. Rather than begin by writing a conventional manuscript, Truman was to talk the book. 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 journalism professor at the University of Southern California, conducted the interviews, while two young research assistants checked his statements against the files.

By late fall, more than 100,000 words had been transcribed, typed, and arranged in looseleaf notebooks, but there was still little actual manuscript. Truman disliked what he saw and scrawled “Good God, what crap!” across it. Harris was dismissed and Morton Royce took over the interviews. Royce pressed Truman repeatedly for fuller answers, returning to the same questions, particularly those about the atomic bomb. The repeated questioning and slow pace irritated Truman, but the scale of the enterprise continued to grow.

By early 1955, the manuscript had reached approximately two million words, against a contract calling for 300,000. Life agreed to accept 580,000 words, and Hillman and Noyes spent more time in Kansas City cutting and trimming. Doubleday decided to publish the work in two volumes. The first volume focused on only the first sixteen months of Truman’s presidency, together with a chapter on his early life and two chapters on his political career before Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death. Bess Wallace Truman also influenced the work behind the scenes: Ken McCormick believed Truman’s decisions about the manuscript improved after the two had talked at home in the evenings.

Delivery and publication

The pressure intensified as the deadline approached. In the final days of June, staff at the Federal Reserve Bank Building worked around the clock. On July 4, 1955, Truman handed Ed 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.” His first payment was a check for $110,000; five promissory notes covered the remainder of the $600,000, with the final installment due in January 1960.

The public release began before the book appeared in full. The opening installment, titled “The Most Momentous First 18 Days,” ran in the September 25 issue of Life, whose cover showed Truman and Bess Wallace Truman in front of their Independence home. Doubleday published Volume One, titled Year of Decisions, five weeks later. At Truman’s autographing party in the grand ballroom of the Muehlebach on November 2, 1955, more than three hundred people were already waiting before the event began. Truman had agreed to sign books, but he expressly refused to turn the occasion into advertising for pens or other products. He planned to use inexpensive fountain pens he had bought at the Twenty-five Cent Store.

The first volume’s title and scope made the opening stretch of the presidency its organizing subject. Its subtitle, “The Most Momentous First 18 Days,” gave the serialized opening an immediate focus; the book then widened its account to cover the first sixteen months in office and Truman’s earlier political life. In one specific retrospective passage, Truman wrote that he now knew what he must do about Douglas MacArthur. The contemporaneous account describes a more cautious sequence: Truman did not announce a decision to dismiss MacArthur at the time, and instead dictated a restrained reprimand reminding the general that public statements had to be cleared with Washington. The contrast shows why the memoirs were not merely a record of what happened, but Truman’s later telling of how he understood a decision.

Reception and legacy

The memoirs inevitably invited comparison with Churchill’s history of the war. Historian Allan Nevins judged Truman’s book short of the era’s best memoirs as a literary performance, but still called it a volume of distinction. His assessment emphasized Truman’s conscientiousness, his conception of the presidency, and the growth he showed in office; it treated the book’s limitations alongside the qualities of the man who had written it.

The account also provoked disagreement. Jimmy Byrnes and Henry Wallace, among other major participants, issued protests and rebuttals to Truman’s version of events. Yet controversy accompanied renewed attention rather than preventing it. The memoirs and their serialization in Life prompted readers to reconsider Truman and his presidency; Volume Two followed the next spring. Their publication marked the beginning of a steady revival of Truman’s reputation and, in the book’s account, the opening of one of the happiest passages in his long life.