Merle Miller

Merle Miller was a novelist and former reporter whose recorded conversations with Harry S. Truman became the basis for Plain Speaking, a popular portrait of the former President. Miller approached Truman first as the writer and organizer of a proposed television series, but the interviews yielded something more durable: an intimate, vivid account shaped by Truman’s stories and Miller’s recognition that the man differed sharply from the presidential image he had expected.

Background and the television project

In the summer of 1961, Truman began work on a series of television films about the presidency, focused chiefly on his own years in the White House. The project was intended, like his memoirs and the Truman Library, to educate the country, especially younger Americans; Truman often said he was particularly interested in children. David Susskind and his company, Talent Associates, were to produce and finance the films.

Miller was selected as the writer and general organizer. He had grown up in the Midwest, had been a book-loving boy who wore eyeglasses, and had once dreamed of glory—details that led the project’s organizers to think he and Truman had much in common. His professional background also suited the assignment: he was both a novelist and a former reporter for Yank. The proposed series gave him a reason to spend sustained time with Truman, but the recorded conversations became more consequential than the films themselves.

From expectation to personal portrait

Miller had not expected to like Truman. His own background had led him to imagine the former President as too much like people he had known in Marshalltown, Iowa, and he had thought a President ought to possess something of a regal quality. Meeting Truman unsettled that expectation. Miller came to regard him as extraordinarily intelligent and well informed, and as a decent, considerate person genuinely concerned with the welfare and comfort of others.

That impression arose not only from Truman’s political recollections but from his manner with people. Miller remembered him asking about a visitor’s well-being, hotel, and food, and making a point of putting others at ease. The contrast mattered: the public figure associated with combative political performance could, in private, be attentive and solicitous. Miller’s recorded portrait made that everyday consideration part of the evidence for understanding Truman, rather than treating presidential character as something revealed only in speeches or decisions.

Recording Truman: performance and conversation

Miller and producer Robert Alan Aurthur spent hours, eventually days, interviewing Truman with a tape recorder. The sessions brought forth stories and pointed observations in abundance. Miller believed that those who had worked with Truman on his memoirs had done him a disservice by making him seem largely dull; the new conversations, by contrast, showed the force and liveliness of a practiced storyteller.

The filming itself could be less successful. For one planned session, Truman was to talk about the Korean War with a selected group of officers at the Army Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Rather than seeming at ease in the unrehearsed setting, he performed poorly by Aurthur’s account and objected that they were trying to turn him into an actor. The episode exposed a divide between spontaneous conversation and a filmed appearance shaped by the demands of production.

Other sessions went well, and the difference was not simply a matter of topic. In New York, Aurthur recalled Truman giving answers rich in detail and authority, and asking more than once to try again because he believed he could improve his response. When someone worried that Truman might not be wearing the same tie as in earlier sessions in Independence, he questioned whether such continuity mattered if the audience was meant to listen to his account of Korea. The anecdote captures his impatience with surface presentation when he thought it distracted from substance.

The recordings preserved more than prepared political commentary. Their sound was often difficult to follow: static and the voices of people entering and leaving Truman’s office intruded. Yet the atmosphere on the tapes was frequently one of laughter and easy fellowship, and Miller thought Truman plainly enjoyed the conversations. He heard a voice that was strong and lower, more appealing than Truman’s platform voice. The imperfect recordings thus retained the texture of informal exchange as well as the stories themselves.

Storytelling, memory, and reliability

Miller’s admiration did not mean that he treated every recollection as exact. He found Truman an excellent storyteller, with an infectious enjoyment in recounting events, but also recognized a tendency to exaggerate or invent. To express this qualification, Miller recalled Huck Finn’s judgment of Mark Twain: that he told the truth mainly, though he stretched some things. In Miller’s portrait, storytelling was both a source of Truman’s vitality and a reason to distinguish a compelling memory from a fully dependable account.

The book that emerged from the recorded conversations was Plain Speaking, published twelve years after the television project began. It presented Truman through his own reminiscences and through the impressions of people close to him. The book’s later biographical value was therefore substantial but qualified: an assessment of it in the account of Truman’s life describes it as lively and valuable while warning that it was not altogether reliable as to fact. Miller’s contribution lies in the vividness of the portrait, not in a guarantee that every remembered detail can be accepted without scrutiny.

Legacy of the conversations

The recordings outlasted the immediate television work. Miller gave the biographer exclusive access to his recorded conversations with Truman; at the time described in the acknowledgments, the tapes were held at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and closed to researchers at Miller’s request. That arrangement made Miller’s access unusually important while limiting wider examination of the underlying material.

Miller’s role consequently had two parts. He helped initiate a project meant to bring Truman’s presidency to a younger audience, and he preserved a conversational portrait that challenged his own initial assumptions about the man. Plain Speaking offered a strikingly personal view of Truman’s intelligence, courtesy, humor, and command of narrative, while its acknowledged looseness with fact made the distinction between character portrait and documentary record essential to its use.