First Draft of History

"I never did give anybody hell," said Harry S. Truman. "I just told the truth on 'em, and they thought it was hell."

Thus began an extraordinary hour of television this week on CBS's See It Now, choice fragments from a ten-hour interview spaced over four days last February in a quiet cottage in the Florida Keys. The ten hours of film and a 620-page transcript of the whole interview, the first such portrait of an ex-President ever done, will become part of the Truman Library at Independence, Mo. For speaking freely, Truman asked only to put the lid (for his lifetime) on some 45 minutes of the conversation, covering half a dozen such questions as why he dragged his feet behind Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 campaign. From the rest, except for some locutions too salty for U.S. living rooms, Murrow and Co-Producer Fred W. Friendly had a chance to cull "a first draft of history." Says Friendly: "The material is so rich we could have done another hour-long show just as good as this one--and we'll probably do it."

Never before has a figure of Truman's historical size let down his hair at such candid, colloquial length before so vast an audience. On the Missouri Waltz, he said: "I don't give a damn about it, but I can't say it out loud because it's the song of Missouri. It's as bad as The Star-Spangled Banner so far as music is concerned." A bright-eyed 72 when the film was shot. Truman favored posterity with his sunburst smile and flashes of his shrewdness, wisdom and trove of history. The camera and microphone etched the old cockiness and the saber-toothed campaigning technique as well as it caught the homespun simplicity and twinkling humor. Thanks partly to skilled editing, but mostly to its star's sheer self-characterization as an uncommon common man, the show was an uncommonly evocative historic document that made TV history of its own. Items:

P: On the firing of General Douglas MacArthur, who considered himself "the proconsul in Asia": "It's too bad that the general didn't have a good political adviser. If he'd have consulted me about what he ought to do, I would have made it much easier for him, and he'd be a much more popular man than he is today."

P: "I think about the only time that I ever acted when I was really out of sorts was when I told a music critic where to get off when he said some mean things about my daughter. If I had thought about it a while, I probably wouldn't have done it."

P: "The most difficult decision I had to make while I was in office was Korea." Any regrets? "Not the slightest, not the slightest in the world."

P: On negotiating with the Russians: "You never could tell what Molotov wanted or what he believed. He is one of the pig-headedest men that ever I've come in contact with, and whenever I wanted him to perform, I called Stalin up and told him what I'd like to have done. Then Molotov would do it ... Stalin at Potsdam made a very agreeable impression on me. He was easy enough to get along with and he was --it was easy enough to make agreement with him. Of course, I didn't know at that time he had no intention of keeping it."

P: General Eisenhower "wrote the best letter on why a military man shouldn't be President of the U.S. that's ever been stated ... He gave me a copy of it and I've still got it, and I never used it on him at all ... Zachary Taylor and General Grant and the present occupant of the White House are good men. They're honorable men. They want to do the right thing, but they've been educated in a manner that's like a horse with blinders on--he only sees one direction right down the road."

P: "The U.S. Government turns its Chief Executives out to grass. They're just allowed to starve or--in fact, sometimes they're tempted to become advertising mediums . . . Two or three of our Presidents practically starved to death because they wouldn't do that ... If I hadn't inherited some property that finally paid things through,* I'd be on relief right now."

*In 1947 President Truman and his brother and sister inherited about 600 acres of Missouri farmland from their mother. In various deals since then, the Trumans have sold all but 40 acres at undisclosed prices. When Truman closed the most recent deal last month, selling 220 acres for a housing development to be known as Truman Village, the value of the land was locally estimated as $1,000 or more an acre.

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