The Harry S Truman Library Institute sent me a mailing about a month ago announcing the Institute’s plans to celebrate President Truman’s birthday, May 8. That took me back 47 years, to the spring of 1965, when I was conducting research for my M.A. thesis on President Truman's press conferences.*
The Institute gave me a grant that just about covered gas for the trip from Carbondale, Illinois, to Independence, Missouri, and lunches for a week or ten days of research at the Truman Library in Independence (I bunked with my parents, who lived in a Kansas suburb on the other side of Kansas City).
Near the end of my stay, I asked to meet Mr. Truman, and on my last day there I was given a brief audience, though I was cautioned that I could use nothing from our talk in my thesis. At precisely the time of my appointment, Mr. Truman appeared in the doorway between his office and the sitting room next to it looking just like, well, Harry Truman, in double-breasted suit and thick glasses, and he greeted me with a big give-me-your-vote smile and strong handshake.
Mr. Truman motioned for me to take a seat on the couch and sat down next to me. We chatted a bit about his views of the press conference, though I can’t recall that anything I might have used came out of the conversation. In my reading of the press conference transcripts, I had come across instances in which Mr. Truman misspoke in answering a question and after reporters had played those up in their stories, he sometimes had sharp words for them. Reporters also sometimes tried to push him to respond in a way that he didn’t want to respond or read more into his responses than he intended or flat out misconstrued what he had said. In those instances, the president chastised the reporters. He occasionally took their bosses to task for what he saw as the publishers' biases against him and his administration.
Mr. Truman motioned for me to take a seat on the couch and sat down next to me. We chatted a bit about his views of the press conference, though I can’t recall that anything I might have used came out of the conversation. In my reading of the press conference transcripts, I had come across instances in which Mr. Truman misspoke in answering a question and after reporters had played those up in their stories, he sometimes had sharp words for them. Reporters also sometimes tried to push him to respond in a way that he didn’t want to respond or read more into his responses than he intended or flat out misconstrued what he had said. In those instances, the president chastised the reporters. He occasionally took their bosses to task for what he saw as the publishers' biases against him and his administration.
I had hoped to get his reaction to all that, to take something substantive away from the interview, but I was disappointed. When I sensed that my time was nearly up, however, I asked, "Mr. Truman, do you think the press abused you when you were president?" He leaned over, looked me in the eye, and in his clipped “Mizzurah” twang he said, "No. They can't abuse the President of the United States." Then he punched my left leg just above the knee with his right forefinger a time or two, his eyes narrowed, and he said, "But there were a helluva lot of 'em who would have if they could have."
Off the record though the interview was, I confess that I could not resist using that statement in my thesis. But I softened (or hid, if you like) the lapse by including it not in the text, but in a footnote, and when I sent a copy to the library, as required by the grant agreement, the only criticism that Philip C. Brooks, the director of the library, had was that I had misspelled the name of one of Mr. Truman's advisers, Harry Vaughan, as "Vaughn."
Off the record though the interview was, I confess that I could not resist using that statement in my thesis. But I softened (or hid, if you like) the lapse by including it not in the text, but in a footnote, and when I sent a copy to the library, as required by the grant agreement, the only criticism that Philip C. Brooks, the director of the library, had was that I had misspelled the name of one of Mr. Truman's advisers, Harry Vaughan, as "Vaughn."
None of my professor thesis committee members caught the misspelling. But, as professors do, they did read the footnotes, and they enjoyed the comment as much as I did – and as I still do.
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*During Truman’s presidency, most reporters at the press conferences were “press.” Almost without exception they were correspondents for newspapers or the wire services that provided news to newspapers, though some radio reporters were part of the White House press corps. It has only been in more recent years, with the explosion of reporters for television that the abominable term “media conference" has come about. If I had my way, the term would be "news conference" to put the emphasis on the news and not the news gatherers.
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I mined my thesis for two articles for academic journals:
“Truman and the Press Conference,” Journalism Quarterly, 43:4 (Winter, 1966), 671-79; 708.
“Truman and the Broadcaster,” Journal of Broadcasting, 13:1 (Winter, 1968-69), 17-22.
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