Clifton Truman Daniel Oral History Interview

Clifton Truman Daniel

NPS and Clifton Truman Daniel

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH CLIFTON TRUMAN DANIEL

JULY 7, 1994
INDEPENDENCE, MISSOURI

INTERVIEWED BY JON TAYLOR
ORAL HISTORY #1994-1
This transcript corresponds to audiotapes DAV-AR #

HARRY S TRUMAN NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR

EDITORIAL NOTICE

This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for Harry S Truman National Historic Site. After a draft of this transcript was made, the park provided a copy to the interviewee and requested that he or she return the transcript with any corrections or modifications that he or she wished to be included in the final transcript. The interviewer, or in some cases another qualified staff member, also reviewed the draft and compared it to the tape recordings. The corrections and other changes suggested by the interviewee and interviewer have been incorporated into this final transcript. The transcript follows as closely as possible the recorded interview, including the usual starts, stops, and other rough spots in typical conversation. The reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written, word. Stylistic matters, such as punctuation and capitalization, follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition. The transcript includes bracketed notices at the end of one tape and the beginning of the next so that, if desired, the reader can find a section of tape more easily by using this transcript.
Clifton Truman Daniel and Jim Williams reviewed the draft of this transcript. Their corrections were incorporated into this final transcript by Perky Beisel in summer 2001. A grant from Eastern National Park and Monument Association funded the transcription and final editing of this interview.

RESTRICTION

Researchers may read, quote from, cite, and photocopy this transcript without permission for purposes of research only. Publication is prohibited, however, without permission from the Superintendent, Harry S Truman National Historic Site.

ABSTRACT

Clifton Truman Daniel, eldest grandson of Harry S Truman and Bess W. Truman discusses holiday and summer visits with his grandparents in Independence, Missouri. The walking tour of the 219 North Delaware home reveals an abundance of family stories and information about the persons and objects associated with the house.

Persons mentioned: Harry S Truman, Bess W. Truman, Margaret Truman Daniel, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Thomas Washington Daniel, E. Clifton Daniel, Jr., Gerald R. Ford, Thucydides, William Wallace Daniel, Harrison Gates Daniel, Vietta Garr, Arletta Brown, Madge Gates Wallace, May Wallace, Keith Drews, Natalie Ott Wallace, Tom Stafford, and Senator Spottswood.

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH CLIFTON TRUMAN DANIEL

HSTR INTERVIEW #1994-1

This is an oral history interview with Clifton Truman Daniel, President Harry S Truman’s eldest grandson, recorded in the Truman Home on July 7, 1994. Jon Taylor, the park historian, will be conducting the interview, and Carol Dage, the museum curator, and Scott Stone, the museum technician, are also present operating the recording equipment.
JON E. TAYLOR: Okay, now we will begin in the living room. What I’m really interested in is Christmas at 219 North Delaware. Can you tell us where the Christmas tree would have been placed?
CLIFTON TRUMAN DANIEL: I remember the tree being in this corner, or about here. I think they’ve moved some things. The one Christmas I remember coming, it was in this corner [unintelligible]. They put it here. I remember one Christmas there’s a picture of me with a Marine sergeant’s uniform, a full-dress Marine uniform, blowing a bugle. That uniform was hanging on the wall. They had put it up, I think hung it where one of the paintings is. They’d just hung it on a hangar so they could see it. But I remember the tree being over in this area. It wasn’t centered, as far as I can recall.
TAYLOR: It wasn’t in the bay window, as you recall?
DANIEL: As I recall, no, but I’m recalling one Christmas, and so I think that Christmas it was off to the side.
TAYLOR: Did you have any Christmas traditions?
DANIEL: It’s actually funny. Christmas is kind of hazy around here. That’s the one I remember the best, was the one where the uniform was.
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TAYLOR: Could you explain about the uniform?
DANIEL: I wanted a band uniform. I had been to parades with my parents, and I had seen the plumed hats and the gold braid and the double-breasted uniform, the stripe down the pants, and all of the marching. I wanted one of those really badly. That was my request to Santa Claus, or maybe directly to my grandfather, I don’t remember, but I requested that. And when I got here, the uniform that he had for me was not what I had asked for. And I don’t remember whether I was disappointed or not, but obviously I put it on and played the bugle. It was a beautiful uniform. And I don’t know how you can get one of those things, a full-dress Marine uniform for a five-year-old.
TAYLOR: So it was specially made then, do you think?
DANIEL: I think so. Somebody might have done that. The Marines might have done it for him, I don’t know. Or he could have bought it. They didn’t have Toys ‘R Us, but who knows?
TAYLOR: Now did you come down the stairs?
DANIEL: Yes, we came down the stairs. That’s something we did at home in New York: you came down the stairs and Dad took the movies. I don’t remember exactly if he was taking movies, but he probably was because he always had the big bank of lights of the camera, like you see the lights attached to the top. It was a 16-millimeter back in those days, and he’d film us as we were coming down the stairs and in to open up our presents. We had Christmas in here.
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TAYLOR: Do you remember any special gifts other than your dress uniform that you received?
DANIEL: Not beyond that, no. Not that year, not anything else. The best presents in the house, for me, were the stuff, the toys that I played with that my grandmother had upstairs. They weren’t mine, they stayed here, and I got a couple of them. They were little guns they had in boxes, little replicas . . . [tape turned off] . . . I got the remains of one. I should not have gotten it, because once I had it, it kind of fell apart. I got it after her death in 1982. I just took it home, because I’d loved it since I was three or four years old. I took it home, and I think pieces of it are still in my dresser upstairs, but I’m not a good curator.
TAYLOR: Now there’s another incident that occurred here regarding the table and some guns.
DANIEL: Uh, yeah.
TAYLOR: Could you recall that for us?
DANIEL: This would be the table, and what we did was . . . My grandmother had bought us two plastic Okinawa guns, or whatever they called them. They looked like little plastic M-16s, and you loaded them on the top, on the clip, and you put plastic bullets—I guess they must have been about that long, about two inches long—put them in the top, and you pulled back a spring. One bullet fell in, you pulled the trigger, and the spring went and fired the bullet out the end of the gun. I think it had a range of about fifteen or twenty
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feet. And on a rainy day, we put a soft drink can square in the middle of the table, not bothering to clear off anything else that might have been there, and we laid down over here on the floor in front of the bookcase and started pegging away at the can. Now, the accuracy of those guns was . . . This looks like nothing of a distance, but we couldn’t hit the thing, so we were firing and firing and firing. And my grandfather was the only one within earshot, and he came from the den. He came back in here, did not make a sound, came up behind us, and just reached down and took that gun out of my hand and just stared at me. And didn’t say a word. And just turned on his heel and took that gun and took off. I mean, I was never ever going to do that again. I just knew by the look on his face. He didn’t scold me, he just looked at me.
TAYLOR: And were you allowed to play with those guns again?
DANIEL: I never saw that one again, no. I was hoping you guys knew where that was.
TAYLOR: Well, I think we’ll take a look at it later.
DANIEL: No!
TAYLOR: Yes, we will.
DANIEL: Ooh, goose bumps. Okay. Well, that one at least was gone. The other one we were allowed to keep because . . . I don’t know where that was, but mine was . . . my grandfather took mine.
TAYLOR: Here’s a picture of your grandfather.
DANIEL: That’s my grandmother’s favorite, isn’t it?
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TAYLOR: Yes, it is.
DANIEL: It’s a good portrait.
TAYLOR: Did your mother, Margaret, make any comments about this? I think she likes it as well.
DANIEL: I think she likes it, yeah. Is that a Greta Kempton?
TAYLOR: No, this is . . .
CAROLE DAGE: J. Wesley Jacobs.
TAYLOR: Are there any other special remembrances in this room that you can recall?
DANIEL: No. We all posed when I was . . . The year before my grandfather died we came for Christmas, and we all posed at that couch. We all sat down there. My grandparents sat down on the couch, and my father, brother, and I stood behind it, and I think my mother sat on the couch with my grandparents. And the two younger brothers, Harrison and Thomas. It was also in this room that we greeted President Johnson and President Nixon after my grandfather’s funeral, and President Johnson was–very sick then. We didn’t know it, but he had only, what, two weeks to live?
TAYLOR: Yes, a very short time.
DANIEL: I remember my father standing right here in front of the bookcase talking to Richard Nixon, who was standing here, and my brother Thomas, who was about six years old at the time, was tugging on Mr. Nixon’s coat. He wanted to get his attention real bad, and Mr. Nixon was up with his arms like this, just ignoring him completely. I remember, being a big fourteen and being
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somewhat of a radical at the time, I figured that . . . I wouldn’t have voted for him at the time, so I was thinking, Well, he’s not paying attention to my little brother. I was standing over here somewhere getting irritated that the President wouldn’t look down. And finally my father said, “Mr. Nixon, excuse me, but the young man wants to talk to you.” And Mr. Nixon went, “Oh, excuse me!” and looked down. And Thomas looked up and said, “Where are your sons?” He wanted to know if the President had brought his own kids so Thomas could play with them. He said, “I don’t have any sons. I have girls and they’re both grown up,” something like that. So I remember that in here, and my grandmother greeting . . . I think my grandmother sat in this chair during all of that.
This was where I remember her sitting most of the time when I was older. This was where she sat, and she had books piled up on either side of the chair, stacks that high, where she could just take them off one stack and put them on the other. I guess one was an in pile and one was an out pile. murder mysteries, one pile to the other. And that’s where she sat. She had it pushed back a little further, I think, but I just remember her sitting here.
TAYLOR: Okay. Now did your grandfather have a place in here that he liked to sit?
DANIEL: No. My memories are all in the study, sitting in the study. That was his domain. I usually went in there when he wasn’t, if I wanted to pull his books of the shelves and look at the Civil War pictures. So I snuck in there.
TAYLOR: Now we’ll enter in what we call the Gates bedroom. Do you have any
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remembrances in here?
DANIEL: Yeah, I slept in here a couple times. I think this is where I stayed after my grandmother died, when we were here for the funeral. I think, I’m not sure. But I remember sleeping on that bed when I was younger, and for some reason I think that bed was pushed up against the wall. But I don’t know that it would have been, because it would have been in the way of the bathroom. One of the things I remember . . . Can I touch the bedspread just for a second?
DAGE: Sure, go ahead.
DANIEL: Are these the same ones that have always been in here?
DAGE: Those are the ones that were here when we assumed the ownership.
DANIEL: Okay. They gave me a blanket that was one of the softest blankets I have ever had on me in my life. I loved it because you could pull it up and cuddle with it. That was a memory from when I was younger. And my parents had rougher blankets, I guess. They had wool blankets, but this one was like . . . you know, it was like chamois or something. It was really soft. That’s just a vivid memory I have of sleeping in here. But I don’t know why I was in here. I was younger.
TAYLOR: Was your other brother in here, Will, do you think?
DANIEL: I don’t know if he slept in here or not. I don’t know if . . .
TAYLOR: But you would have been by yourself, do you think?
DANIEL: Well, no, they may have . . . I don’t know, they have enough bedrooms that
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they could have put one of us in each in this house, but I don’t know . . . He probably did. When we were younger, they put us in in pairs when they took us anywhere. Harrison and Thomas, me and William, just paired us off so they wouldn’t use up all the bedrooms. I remember those things. I used to stare at these figurines.
TAYLOR: So they were in here most of the time, most of the times that you were in here?
DANIEL: I think so. The tumbling angels? Yeah, they look familiar. It’s not a great big memory. This one is more familiar to me than the tumbling angels.
TAYLOR: That’s the music box?
DANIEL: Yeah, the music box with the . . . I guess, what, doves?
TAYLOR: Doves, yes.
DANIEL: Some of these things I haven’t seen in twelve years. [chuckling] The World’s Fair, I think, isn’t it?
TAYLOR: It’s a picture of your mother and your father and . . .
DANIEL: And us, I think, at the World’s Fair.
TAYLOR: Do you think in Seattle?
DANIEL: Oh, my god! I look like I’m wearing makeup. That’s my first actor’s headshot, so I probably am wearing makeup.
TAYLOR: You would have been acting for . . . ?
DANIEL: It’s a resume shot that you hand out when you go to auditions. They just want that with a resume clipped to the back of it. So I had those done when I
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was about, I guess, twenty-one, twenty-two. If you could tell, I weighed about thirty more pounds than I do now when that was taken. I don’t think there’s anything else that I can think of. I’ve slept in just about every room in the house at various times, depending on who was where and what we were doing, how old I was, and whether my grandfather was alive, or Grandmother, depending on which rooms they needed.
TAYLOR: Now, if you were a guest, normally they would come through the front doors, of course, right?
DANIEL: Yes.
TAYLOR: One of the first things that they would see is a picture of your mother.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
TAYLOR: How would you characterize your mother? Do you have any particular thoughts on that particular picture?
DANIEL: That picture? Of course, when I was little that was a stunning revelation to me. I had no idea that my mother ever looked like that—you know, that was such a formal portrait—but I got used to it over the years. I think it’s a good painting.
TAYLOR: I do, too.
DANIEL: It’s not unreasonably flattering. You know, it looks like her. It’s not some sort of stylized . . . or they didn’t . . . It looks like her. It’s a good picture. It looks like her.
TAYLOR: Now were you here when any other dignitaries happened to call, do you
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recall?
DANIEL: Not that I can think of. No presidents or . . . I know that Gerald Ford was here when they unveiled the Truman statue in the square, but I don’t remember where I was. I don’t remember it specifically. As I said, the only reason that the Richard Nixon episode stuck in my mind was because it was annoying to me that Thomas was tugging and tugging and not getting a response.
TAYLOR: All right, we’ll step into the music room.
DANIEL: Okay. The first memory that immediately comes to mind in this room is this is where the Secret Service agent sat when he came downstairs at night when my grandmother was still alive. He and I pulled up two chairs in front of the television. It might have been these two, I don’t know, but he’d pull up a chair . . . He’d take out a sawed-off shotgun out of a case and put it down in front of his chair and sit down, and I would sit down next to him, we’d watch a little TV, and then I’d go upstairs to bed. This was for Truman Week, I think, when I was about nineteen years old. We were here for that when I was nineteen. Or it might have been the statue unveiling when President Ford was here, the statue in the square unveiling.
TAYLOR: But that would have been a nightly occurrence, you think, regardless of whether you were here?
DANIEL: Yes, for three nights. Oh no, he was here every night. That was his job, to come when everybody went to bed. He came in and sat down here on guard.
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And I don’t remember why that was. You’d have to ask the Secret Service why they thought they needed someone in the house at night. But I never slept better: I went upstairs, there’s a guy with a shotgun downstairs on my side.
TAYLOR: [chuckling] Guarding you. Did you watch TV a lot in here?
DANIEL: No, this was not a TV house. First of all, you had a bunch of people who didn’t really like TV. They liked books, and you didn’t get really good reception. They didn’t care about the television set, so you had two or three fuzzy channels. So there really wasn’t much you could watch. He and I used to maybe watch Johnny Carson and that was it, watch the Tonight Show, and then I’d go to bed about one o’clock in the morning and he’d stay down here all night, the Secret Service agent.
TAYLOR: Now the piano, did you play the piano?
DANIEL: I played the piano infrequently, because in those days my mother . . . My mother signed us up for piano lessons, didn’t ask us if we wanted piano lessons, just signed us up, and I had mine on Saturday afternoons when I wanted to be playing baseball or whatever. So I used to hope that the teacher would get hit by a bus on his way over to my house, which is unkind and I take it back immediately, but I didn’t play much when I was here, no. I mean, just for my grandfather as a child, I’m sure that they had me play . . . perform at age eight or nine, you know, to show him what I was learning. But as I got older I didn’t play it.
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TAYLOR: Now do you recall your grandfather playing?
DANIEL: No.
TAYLOR: Not for Christmas or any special occasions?
DANIEL: No, and I think in a lot of the stuff that I’ve read that he didn’t play a lot, you know, for enjoyment. I mean he could, but didn’t in his later years. I don’t remember him playing. My mother I remember playing quite a lot because I used to make her play for me. I’d bring her my sheet music and I’d say, “Mom, I’m having a little trouble getting this. Would you play it for me so I can see what it sounds like?” And she’d say, “Sure,” and she’d read it right off the music, and I’d watch her fingers and copy her. I can’t read piano music to save my life, but I can . . . play by ear is what it is.
TAYLOR: Were there any favorite places to sit in here?
DANIEL: No, this wasn’t a room we used much. The only reason I was in here in later years is because the Secret Service agent was in here.
TAYLOR: He was a person to play with, so to speak?
DANIEL: Right. Well, yeah . . .
TAYLOR: Keep company with.
DANIEL: Yeah, a larger person to play with. But we didn’t do much in this room. That’s a nice painting of my grandmother, too.
TAYLOR: Did your mother ever make any comments about it?
DANIEL: Not that I can recall, no. I never really noticed the wallpaper. That’s kind of neat.
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TAYLOR: Now we’ll step into the study.
DANIEL: I remember that. [chuckling] Oh, yeah. The inner sanctum. It’s a lot neater than it was when he was alive. He did the same thing that my grandmother did: He piled up books on either side of his chair and read. And the shelves, that’s where I used to steal the Civil War books from. They were piled up in there, and I loved looking at the pictures. Where’s the heating grate?
TAYLOR: This one?
DANIEL: That’s not the original. Is that the original, the heating system?
SCOTT STONE: Are you looking for one in the floor?
DANIEL: Yeah, I think so, or maybe one just up against the wall.
STONE: Right over there. That one?
DANIEL: Yes. That’s the one you can . . . We should experiment with this. Because if you talk through that, you can be heard up in the bathroom in the back of the house, back up in here, the bathroom off of my grandfather’s old dressing room. And we knew that. We were up there playing and we heard them talking about us down here, and shouted into it, “Hey! Can you hear us?” And they all shut up. So we should have kept listening and we would have heard. But that’s the grate. I thought it was on this side of the wall, but . . .
TAYLOR: So the study is much neater than you recall?
DANIEL: Yes. Was that the desk that he used?
TAYLOR: As far as we know, yes.
DANIEL: Okay. I just thought that stuff was more in the middle of the room. These
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chairs may have been pulled out a little farther so he could use the bookshelves.
TAYLOR: So your grandmother usually read in the living room, and your grandfather in here?
DANIEL: Now, this is two separate times. I just know that he, when I knew him, he read in here most of the time. This is where he read. This was his office, his study, this is where he stayed. When they were younger, they both, I think, used to read in here. And I burned myself really badly on that lamp once, because it gets really hot.
STONE: Yes, it does.
DANIEL: I mean a welt and the whole thing, blisters and . . . But they both read in here when they were younger. But when I knew him, I remember him reading in here, and when she was older, after he died I remember her reading in there. I think while both of them were still living, they probably still sat in here.
TAYLOR: Yes, that’s usually the story. Do you remember him reading to you?
DANIEL: No. By the time I was old enough to come in here and have the memories of it, this was a place that . . . You didn’t avoid it, but I mean we’re young and running around and he’s reading, so we didn’t quite have the same agenda. I remember this, the stamp. And the address crimper. Isn’t that what that is?
TAYLOR: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: I think my parents have one at home, too, but I remember that. And I remember this letter opener because of the jockey on the top. And the canes
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in the corner. It looks nice in here, but it is a lot neater than it was. I mean, they weren’t messy, but the books were . . . I just got a feeling of many more books on tabletops and piled up in . . .
TAYLOR: Did he read to you in New York when he came on visits?
DANIEL: Apparently. My mother tells the story that when I was three or two and William was like eleven months old, he came and sat down with us in an armchair in the living room and was reading to us from some huge green . . .
TAYLOR: Thucydides?
DANIEL: Thucydides or something like that, right, and we were listening. Probably because we were scared to death. [chuckling] But my mother came down and found us sitting there raptly listening to him while he read Greek history. You couldn’t get me to sit still for that today.
TAYLOR: Any other remembrances that you have of this room?
DANIEL: No. For me, this is what I sort of considered the heart of the house, because this is where he was. Aside from the heating vent and all that stuff, this was the command center. This is where Grandpa was.
TAYLOR: So you wouldn’t necessarily come in and have a seat and talk?
DANIEL: And start fooling around? No. Like I said, I usually came in and looked at the books when he wasn’t here. I may have done it when he was here when I was younger, but I wasn’t interested in the Civil War until after we took a trip out here when I was eleven, something like that, ten or eleven or twelve years old. We drove through Gettysburg first, the battlefield, and I became
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fascinated. And I got here and I looked on this shelf up here . . . I don’t know, it’s not in the same place now, but I looked on this shelf and saw the Civil War and just went “Oooh!” and grabbed it. And I don’t know if he was in here or not at the time. I don’t remember him being in here, because there would have been a conversation afterwards. He would have said, “Are you interested in that? And let me tell you . . .” I mean, he would have said something, but I don’t remember any . . . of him telling me anything.
TAYLOR: Would he send you books in the mail?
DANIEL: No.
TAYLOR: We’re entering the dining room now.
DANIEL: Yeah. The food was always good.
TAYLOR: What would be a typical menu?
DANIEL: Well, I remember Thanksgiving and Christmastimes, turkeys, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, peas, butter, rolls.
TAYLOR: Who would be here at those dinners?
DANIEL: Grandpa here, my grandmother down at the other end, and whoever you could fit along either side. It was mostly just the family when we were together. It was me and Will, Mom and Dad, Harrison and Thomas tucked in.
TAYLOR: Where would your mother and dad sit?
DANIEL: Good question. I don’t remember exactly, and it may not have been the same every time, but on the sides. And I think this was my grandfather’s chair,
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because he did the bell ringing. They had a little—there it is—a little bell that he would ring. My parents had, in their apartment, had one of those floor buzzers, yeah, and bing! back in the kitchen. Because we got to ring the bell. That was one of our treats, was when my grandfather . . . We’d say, “Can we ring the bell? Can we ring the bell?” Because it was time to clear the plates, and he had to get Vietta and Arletta in from the kitchen, ring the bell.
TAYLOR: So who would prepare the meals, primarily?
DANIEL: I think Vietta Garr. Vietta was still here when I was young. I don’t know when she quit working for my grandparents. Vietta was the one who made the brownies. And Arletta Brown was the maid, is what they called her. But I always remember Arletta and Vietta being in the kitchen together. And I remember them as a pair, for some reason. And I don’t know how long Arletta worked here, but I remember them as being together.
TAYLOR: Being together?
DANIEL: Yeah, as being together. And of course this is the room where the marbles are.
TAYLOR: Right, let’s go over there.
DANIEL: Now is this a scales? Is this what this is supposed to be originally, or . . . ?
TAYLOR: Well, this is an epergne.
DANIEL: What?
TAYLOR: An epergne. It’s a candy dish. That’s what it basically is.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, this tray at the top was always filled with marbles. Is this where
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you found the marbles after they died?
TAYLOR: Yes.
DANIEL: That’s where they must have been. And I just remember this thing being up here, but it was filled with marbles, and they were all so small. I remember mostly the red and the blue, which is what you’ve got mostly here still, small red and blue marbles. And I put them down the heating grate in the hall and on the second floor, wondering where they’d go. They never went anywhere, except to the boiler. [chuckling] This is one of the first places . . . The brownies and the marbles was where I came . . . We used to come back in the house after a year’s absence or a half a year’s absence and sniff out our favorite things. We’d go find the toy guns upstairs, we’d find the marbles, here, we’d find the brownies . . . So it was go and look and find all this stuff and reacquaint ourselves, and start playing with it immediately.
TAYLOR: So you would get set up for a week or for two or three days?
DANIEL: Yeah, we’d just start. It was like . . .
TAYLOR: Get ready.
DANIEL: Right. We’d just get everything . . . find everything, because we were programmed. We loved this stuff and we came in to find it. And those were my favorite things, the brownies and the marbles. William and I both played with the guns, but I don’t know what . . . He may have had some other things that he liked as well, but that was one of the first things we’d do was come and check it out. Of course when we were older we still did the same thing.
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When I was fourteen, when the hair was long, I came in here and had run . . . Not run, but sort of gone all over the house to check everything out and refresh my memory. My grandfather watched us pass a couple of times from his study, and he asked my mother, he said, “Come in here. Who are those two young men wandering around the house?” And my mother said, “I hate to tell you this, but they’re your grandsons.” And he said, “Well, get them in here and let’s say hello.” So we stood right in front of the door over there in front of the study and he came to the door, and we walked up and said, “Hi, Grandpa.” And he said, “What?” He didn’t hear us the first time. And I leaned a little closer and I said, “We just came to say hello.” And he looked me up and down and said, “Well, do it then.” He wasn’t mean about it, he just said, “Well, do it then.” So we shook his hand, said hello, and he said, “Good, fine,” and he went back in the study and we went . . .
TAYLOR: Back to play.
DANIEL: On back to looking around or whatever. Well, playing . . . At the age of fourteen I was more interested in where could I smoke a cigarette and not get caught.
TAYLOR: Why don’t we take a trip right back here in just a second. What about your grandfather’s habits in the morning?
DANIEL: He was up before I was. Your guess is as good as mine. Oh, well, you’ve still got the world’s longest light cord here. [chuckling]
TAYLOR: Do you remember ever him coming back to get ready to go on a walk?
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DANIEL: No. No, and I’ll tell you the thing now about that, this is one of the . . . That postcard that we have of this is one of the saddest things that I’ve seen in the house because it’s so lonely. That’s his coat. The coat is still here and the hat’s still up there. But it’s a good picture. No, this is where everything was hung up. This is where they hung it up, is basically all it was to me. It was one of these neat little nooks and crannies under here. We didn’t use this door much, I don’t think. We went out through the kitchen. We were always in . . . That was the traffic area back there.
TAYLOR: Did you go on any walks with your grandfather?
DANIEL: Only when forced to. My mother really had to haul us out of bed early in the morning to make us, because he was gone, up and gone. And as he got older, he didn’t take the walks as often with any regularity.
TAYLOR: Where would you go when . . . ?
DANIEL: I don’t think that we’ve ever been on a walk with him here.
TAYLOR: In Independence?
DANIEL: Interestingly enough, yeah. I don’t think . . . I don’t recall that we’ve ever been on a walk. The one time that we were rousted specifically to go was in Duck Key, Florida, when he dedicated the Truman Bridge in Duck Key, and we went out when my mother got us out of bed and put us in our coats and ties and got us out for a walk. And I know we’ve been walking with him in the middle of the day in Key West, there are pictures of us walking with him, but we never went on a morning stroll with him, the famous morning
21
exercise.
TAYLOR: Let’s go into the kitchen and pantry area. Is there anything in the dining room that you recall, any other . . . ?
DANIEL: It’s funny, I don’t remember that door being there. [chuckling] Well, it’s just funny. There’s things that you just don’t notice. I don’t remember there being a door there. I thought it was a window, because you’ve got the window on the other side, and it seems to me like it was a window. No, nothing, just the meals. Just what we were talking about earlier, the meals and the marbles, M and Ms, meals and marbles.
TAYLOR: Would you stop in the pantry at all?
DANIEL: This is traffic area, and this is where they answered the phone. I think this is where most of the phone calls got made. When I was older, this is where I made calls from. If I had to talk to somebody, I called from in here. That’s my wedding anniversary. We got married on their wedding anniversary just for him, just because it came on a Saturday that year and we thought, Well, wouldn’t that be nice? So we were lucky.
TAYLOR: Did you ever eat in the kitchen?
DANIEL: Yeah, breakfast. Every morning. This is where Arletta and Vietta fed us. This is where we ate. We came downstairs to breakfast and lunch. Only dinners were in there, formal dinners. I usually sat over here.
TAYLOR: And what would you have for breakfast?
DANIEL: Cereal, toast, milk, juice. Just the usual. As kids, it was just, you know, they
22
had to get some Cheerios or whatever off the shelf for us. And bacon and eggs. We’d have bacon and eggs if we wanted, because they would . . . They fed you out here. They fed me in New York, too. I’m not saying I was neglected or anything like that, but . . . And those bowls and plates are familiar, the grapevines. They’re pretty. Of course, I didn’t appreciate that when I was a child. It was like, oh, something else to eat out of.
TAYLOR: The pantry. Could you tell us the brownie story again?
DANIEL: The brownie story. Well, Vietta Garr made a mean set of brownies. It was in a cookie tin. I think it was just a tin, round, I think it had a red bottom and a white top with a floral design on the top—just one of those plain old cookie tins—and she’d put in two layers of thick brownies, you know, the kind that’s slightly undercooked, kind of real thick and gooey. She’d put a layer down . . . She’d put wax paper on the bottom, put a layer of brownies in, then she’d put another layer of wax paper and brownies on the top, and a final layer of wax paper on the top, and then close the tin. So the tin always had little corners of wax paper sticking out. And that’s the way . . . I guess that’s the way we always knew there was fresh brownies in there, because the wax paper was sticking out the edge so it was full. But she always had them waiting for us, or she’d cook them after we arrived. But if she knew we were coming, she had them. Because we got to where we could come right back in here and find them.
TAYLOR: Into the pantry?
23
DANIEL: Yep.
TAYLOR: And find them?
DANIEL: Yep.
STONE: This is a good place to take a break and change reels.
TAYLOR: Okay. [tape turned off]
DANIEL: This is not a place that we were allowed to play that much, I don’t think. [chuckling]
TAYLOR: This is primarily where the staff takes a break. [unintelligible].
DANIEL: You know, it’s funny, I don’t think I have even one memory [unintelligible]. It looks kind of familiar. You know, maybe I came down here and looked out the window. No, it is [unintelligible]. What are you doing?
TAYLOR: [To Carol] Do you want to explain that?
DAGE: We are trying to dry out. We had excessive groundwater last year, and thought we had an underground spring. And we had an archaeologist come in, and they determined it wasn’t a spring, but indeed a furnace pier here. And where we thought was a spring, this was half-full of water, and we thought that that might have been the spring, that’s a part of the ductwork system. And there was just so much water that it was coming up through there. But the duct looked like a cold-air return. The wood went under here, connected up to this window here, and then on across to that window. But we’re trying to dry out from last spring, and a little bit of water this spring.
TAYLOR: Do you remember anything?
24
DANIEL: I do not. I remember it as a place, but as far as doing anything specific down here, we didn’t. We didn’t play a lot down here. We did play a little bit just outside the basement.
TAYLOR: At the back?
DANIEL: Yeah. I believe that’s where the Secret Service [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: Do you want to go out this door?
DANIEL: Yeah. This is just a place to hide when we were playing with those guns, those green guns. I think it was this part of the house that we came around. We were playing right here on this, and I came around the corner of the house through the bushes here with the gun, and the Secret Service cameras picked up guns, and they came running around the corner with their guns coming out of their holsters and found the two of us. And then my mother remembers that they sort of surrendered to us [unintelligible]. It scared us, scared me. I mean, I wasn’t ready for such big guys in front.
TAYLOR: Did you spend a lot of time outside?
DANIEL: Yeah, we ran around out here a fair amount. I mean, they’d have to shoo us out of the house after a while.
TAYLOR: Were there any swing sets or any of that back in here?
DANIEL: When I was younger, yeah, I remember . . . I know there was something. I think we had a swing set that sat on the lawn over there.
TAYLOR: On the south side?
DANIEL: Yeah, we did. It sat sort of at an angle, an angle to the house, about over like
25
that. I want to say we also had wagons. I know we had a wagon, because we used to ride it down this little hill here, the path. We used to see if we could keep it straight here as we steered it down the hill. We had the wagon, and we started . . . [unintelligible]. I remember we used to start it . . . We’d come around the whole path of the house. Somebody would push and then we’d get into gear and that kind of [unintelligible]. Let’s see, we had pulleys and . . . Yes, it looks exactly the same. [unintelligible] were here.
TAYLOR: You could have a heyday in here.
DANIEL: Right, we could hide in here.
TAYLOR: Did you ever climb any trees?
DANIEL: Yes, but I don’t remember which ones. You see, most of them, the branches were up too high for us to get a hold. I have a vague memory that when you pushed the wagon on this it sounded like a train, like clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.
TAYLOR: [unintelligible]. Did you have a favorite . . . ? We might want to stop right here so we don’t pick up all of the traffic.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. No, I didn’t have anything else on this. I was just sort of walking around.
TAYLOR: Did you have a place to play, a favorite place outside?
DANIEL: We mostly stayed in the back, in general, and that was just . . . I think that was just something we were encouraged to do. We could run around all in here, but I don’t have a lot of memories of out here. The side and the back
26
mostly, [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: Did you do any sledding in the winter?
DANIEL: Not around the house, unless we got a little rise going . . .
TAYLOR: I know one Christmas your grandmother gave you a sled, you and your brother Will.
DANIEL: Yes. We might have had to take it . . . We might have had to take it over to the park to play, or they might have tried pushing us down here. But I don’t know, there just wasn’t much of a hill here. They used to have these big black [unintelligible] out here.
TAYLOR: Did your grandmother or grandfather play with you, do you remember? Did they come out at all?
DANIEL: If they did, they came out and watched. They didn’t roughhouse with us or anything like that. My father and mother didn’t do a lot of that either. When we were old enough to play together, we played pretty much by ourselves. I seem to remember there were other children around, but I don’t remember who. Neighborhood children would play with us once in a while. I think we had friends that we saw out here occasionally, but I don’t remember who it was.
TAYLOR: Would your grandmother get any games for you to play?
DANIEL: No. No, not that I can remember.
TAYLOR: Or your mother?
DANIEL: No. No, we were pretty much left to . . . Not that I can remember. I mean
27
they may have, but we had the swing set and the wagon and . . . I think it was a wagon. It must have been, because I don’t think it was one of those peddle cars or anything like that.
TAYLOR: And I’m sure you played hide and seek?
DANIEL: Oh yeah. I would imagine in the house, too. The house is a better place to play than out here.
TAYLOR: That’s right.
DANIEL: It’s big enough that you could get lost, but not seriously lost. Out there you could disappear.
TAYLOR: Was there anyone working on the grounds, that you can remember?
DANIEL: Not that I remember, right.
TAYLOR: And the Noland house, you don’t ever recall going there?
DANIEL: No, that is actually the first time I have looked at the Noland house and thought to myself, That’s the Noland house. I had no idea which it was. We were not historically aware of that.
STONE: Shall we go to the back porch? [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: Yes. [sound of footsteps]
DANIEL: This is a great place. It’s odd, because I remember it as being deeper this way, not this way. I don’t know why. I just remember that some way it went out farther that way. That’s [unintelligible] quirks, I guess. Of course, you guys had to rearrange it, haven’t you? [chuckling]
TAYLOR: Did you ever eat out here?
28
DANIEL: Not that I remember. No, I remember being fed in the dining room as kids.
TAYLOR: Do you remember your grandfather or grandmother out here?
DANIEL: Not specifically, no.
TAYLOR: Did you ever have any picnics out here, outside?
DANIEL: Not that I can think of.
TAYLOR: How about the rose garden?
DANIEL: I remember the roses.
TAYLOR: Were there ever any on the side of the house, or closer to the house?
DANIEL: [unintelligible]. I remember the roses because you’d play with them and so on, but I don’t remember anything specific about them. I just remember they were there. And I don’t remember exactly where, but that looks right.
TAYLOR: Your grandmother played bridge [unintelligible]. Do you have any memories of running into a bridge game or anything like that?
DANIEL: No. No, I think that probably when . . . maybe when we were here, they didn’t have the bridge club over. [unintelligible] the bridge club wasn’t here. But then they played every . . . quite a bit.
TAYLOR: Yes. The fans, do you recall the fan?
DANIEL: Not specifically. I was looking at that. No, [unintelligible]. No, not specifically. [unintelligent].
TAYLOR: That was a gift when Mr. Truman was ill. He had had his gallbladder taken out. I want to say it was Dorsey Lou Warr.
DANIEL: Really? Well, I can ask her. I’m going to see her in about an hour, so I can
29
just ask her. I wonder how a fan helps gallbladder surgery.
TAYLOR: I think it’s a nice addition to the porch. They tried to keep it cool out there [unintelligible].
DANIEL: Yes. Does that door still open up?
TAYLOR: Yes, and it’ll go out there. Do you want to go out that way?
DANIEL: [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: We might just cover that on the way. Did you ever play in this room?
DANIEL: Are you kidding? No, of course I did. I was telling the library that they are lucky they have any artifacts left. We took a lot of them home. [unintelligible] and stuff like that.
TAYLOR: So you spent a lot of time rummaging through those?
DANIEL: Yeah.
TAYLOR: Were they in boxes?
DANIEL: In boxes, in bags, out in the open . . . [sound of footsteps] [unintelligible]. That was such a cool thing, to have a desk at the top of these stairs.
TAYLOR: We are in the central hall in the upstairs. Now this would have been your grandmother’s desk?
DANIEL: I guess. I never saw anybody use it. I remember that camera. I don’t know where it was, but it looks familiar. [unintelligible]. [inaudible conversation] My mother’s bedroom. I remember this as my mother’s bedroom, because this is where she slept when we were here, when we came with her.
TAYLOR: This is monitoring equipment. So do you [unintelligible] in the master
30
bedroom?
DANIEL: Was this my grandparents’ bedroom when they lived in the house?
TAYLOR: No, this was Madge Gates Wallace’s room.
DANIEL: Okay. Yeah, that’s right, because [unintelligible] the house. This is where my grandmother kept those little toy guns, the ones in the boxes.
TAYLOR: Let’s go see if we can find them.
DANIEL: Oh, my god, both of them!
TAYLOR: Yes, [unintelligible].
DANIEL: That’s all there were. Oh, my god. They’re a lot bigger than I remember them. I mean, I remember them big, but I assumed that they’d be small. Can I pick one up? And there’s a bullet inside. You guys don’t know this, but that’s great to see. I thought these things would be gone. Where did you find them?
TAYLOR: They were in the room [unintelligible].
DANIEL: Can we still fire it?
TAYLOR: I don’t think so.
DANIEL: Yeah, we were just propped up on the floor downstairs [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: Firing away.
DANIEL: Firing away. And that’s the gun barrel that scared the Secret Service so bad. That came out from around the corner of the house, and they just went nuts.
TAYLOR: What about these two trains?
DANIEL: I remember those. I mean, it looks like you’ve got two for everybody here,
31
one for me and one for William so we wouldn’t get mad at each other. But I remember playing with those. They were [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: Where would you play with them?
DANIEL: Around up here, or downstairs, in our bedrooms, all over the . . .
[End Tape 1, Side A - Begin Tape 1, Side B]
DANIEL: We played around everybody’s feet, in the kitchen or wherever. It just comes back in sort of a flurry of memories. I don’t remember them exactly. This was a good place to hang out though, because, you know, during the day nobody was up there. It was quiet, you know. We could [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: I believe that’s [unintelligible].
DANIEL: [chuckling] Oh, my god. They look familiar. We didn’t play a lot with stuffed animals [unintelligible]. Is that a tiger down there?
TAYLOR: Yes.
DANIEL: They look familiar, but I can’t . . .
TAYLOR: The stuffed tigers and all . . .
DANIEL: Okay. Yeah, they were things that were here that we looked at, that we might have played with a little bit. But being boys, [unintelligible]. We liked the guns and the . . . those little toy guns and all [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: Do you recall the [unintelligible]?
DANIEL: Not specifically, no. I don’t know why . . .
TAYLOR: [unintelligible] also.
DANIEL: Oh, really? Well, it must have been for both of us.
32
TAYLOR: [unintelligible].
DANIEL: [chuckling] Okay.
TAYLOR: [unintelligible].
DANIEL: I always thought this was a neat place—
TAYLOR: The alcove.
DANIEL: The alcove. I just always thought this was a neat place, mostly when I got older. We didn’t play here, I don’t think. They put magazines and stuff and things, so we stayed out of there pretty much. I remember those [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: Why did you think it was neat?
DANIEL: Just because the New York apartment didn’t have things like this. Our apartment was laid out real square, and they just had little steps up, and little steps up into the bedroom. And you stepped down, and you had little corners that didn’t go anywhere, like this, and things like that, and funny shapes all over the house. It was a whole different place.
TAYLOR: Step into the guest bedroom.
DANIEL: The guest bedroom I’ve also slept . . .
TAYLOR: [unintelligible].
DANIEL: Yeah, I’ve slept in here. I stayed in here with my father once. There used, before I look for it, there used to be a [unintelligible]. Here it is! This is how I prove that I’m the genuine article. I remember [unintelligible] these rooms. [unintelligible]. [chuckling] [unintelligible]. Yeah, I remember using it when
33
we came to visit my grandmother when I was nineteen for Truman Week. You know, I had to have shiny shoes [unintelligible], and I used that.
TAYLOR: Did somebody then use this room or this particular desk as office space during [unintelligible]?
DANIEL: I get the impression this is the room my parents stayed in when they came. But if I came with my mother, she would sleep in Grandma Gates’ . . . the master bedroom. And my father and I stayed in here together, for some reason. I can’t remember why we did. It might have been that trip. That’s why I thought there were twin beds in here, because my parents sleep in twin beds. That’s just the way they do. They push them together. There’s no space [unintelligible], and a single headboard, but they like their own covers and their own pillows, so they sleep that way.
TAYLOR: Well, we have a few more toys here.
DANIEL: [unintelligible]. Oh, my gosh! Now that I remember!
TAYLOR: [unintelligible]. The Union Station Game?
DANIEL: Yeah, I remember that.
TAYLOR: Was that a Christmas present, or . . . ?
DANIEL: Oh, it may have been. I don’t remember what . . . [unintelligible]. Yeah, puzzles, but I didn’t do puzzles much.
TAYLOR: Are those the little guns that you were talking about?
DANIEL: No, these are bigger. [unintelligible] small replica. [unintelligible] the ones I was into. I remember the blocks, and these. These were things that we played
34
with when we were younger. I used to love making things out of these, I remember. I really enjoyed that. This was a good toy. I don’t know what you call it, but it connected wood things with little nuts and bolts.
TAYLOR: Not Lincoln logs? [chuckling]
DANIEL: No, I don’t know what it is, but this was a good toy. This was one of my favorites when I was little. I remember making cars and planes. I could make a plane out of these things—you know, make the wings [unintelligible]. In fact, that’s probably one of my wheel struts right there still intact. That looks familiar. I remember playing with the blocks. The rest of this stuff just looks . . . Birds? Okay. I remember the football. I don’t know if that’s the football we were throwing around in the backyard when my grandfather died.
TAYLOR: Those were given to you, I believe. You visited the Truman Sports Complex [unintelligible].
DANIEL: That I don’t recall at all.
TAYLOR: [unintelligible] thrown in for good measure.
DANIEL: And I remember this. [unintelligible] railroad. [unintelligible]. Anything else you specifically want me to look at? Was this box moved here?
TAYLOR: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Okay. That’s why I thought it looked familiar. This is where they kind of kept it. They tucked it out of the way, put all the toys in it, and we could come in and take them out as we wanted to, the toys. [unintelligible]. It is a literal toy box, a toy cardboard box. A cardboard toy box. Okay,
35
[unintelligible]. Yeah, we wouldn’t have been throwing that around. That probably stayed in its box, as I remember it. But this one might have been the one that I was throwing when they took a picture of me and put it in the newspaper when I was sixteen, throwing the ball. Well, the photographers kept bugging us and bugging us and bugging us and bugging us, and finally we went into the backyard to get away from them. And we were throwing the football back and forth, and one of them snuck around on the side of my Aunt Beufie’s house, Aunt May Wallace, snuck around the side of the house, and I was just back like that, and I caught him out of the corner of my eye. So the picture in the paper had me kind of looking this way. The next couple of more frames, he’d have gotten us swearing at him. [unintelligible].
Now this is different. This was over here when I was last up here. Those were both on that side. And my grandmother had fallen when I was just . . . when she was very old, early to mid-nineties. I was visiting with my mother, and we heard her calling. My mother did. My mother had to call me. My mother was in there and heard her calling faintly. She had fallen down, I think, between the bed and the wall over here. And I remember coming around the foot of the bed and picking her up. I had to get her up off the floor and sit her on the edge of the bed. And she told my mother she was quite impressed that I could just pick her up like that. But she didn’t weigh anything. She must have weighed eighty, ninety pounds, if that. She was very, very small at the time, very [unintelligible]. But yeah, I’m almost sure
36
the beds were like this.
TAYLOR: On the north wall?
DANIEL: On the north wall, yes. Is this the way they were found?
TAYLOR: Yes.
DANIEL: It must have been after that they rearranged things, because she had to move downstairs by that time. She was up here. She fell up here, she was still living up here. And was this my grandparents’ room?
TAYLOR: Yes.
DANIEL: Okay, that’s what I thought. Let me pull this out. [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: Well, there’s a few pictures here.
DANIEL: Okay, yeah. There’s one of those in the library, the piano playing.
TAYLOR: Was this taken in New York?
DANIEL: That the New York apartment, right. The front door is right behind you and the living room is out this way. This is the way I would actually go to get through here. [chuckling]
TAYLOR: [unintelligible].
DANIEL: This is another one of those little nooks and crannies that we used to love. Did this thing use to have a rug in it?
TAYLOR: No, that’s currently how we found it. We keep everything positioned exactly as when we took it over. Now, you can look at the pattern on the floor.
DANIEL: Well, yes.
TAYLOR: [unintelligible].
37
DANIEL: Okay, that’s what I thought. I don’t remember seeing a whole lot of bare floor in this house. When I was growing up here, they had carpeting or rugs in a lot of it.
TAYLOR: We consider this to be your mother’s childhood room.
DANIEL: Right.
TAYLOR: And also, later on, your grandmother’s dressing room. Do you recall—
DANIEL: Right. That’s about what it was when I was here. [unintelligible] no specific memories that I have of this room, other than this cabinetry we might have been poking around it for toys or something to look at, but nothing . . . [unintelligible]. For me, it was a way to get to the dressing room [unintelligible]. Most of the time, as I remember, as an older child this is where I slept. When I was older, as an older teenager, this is where I stayed.
TAYLOR: Mr. Truman’s dressing room?
DANIEL: Right. [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: Would he come in? Do you ever recall him coming in here and using it? Did he ever take naps?
DANIEL: No, this would have been when I was older, I think, as in . . . either after he died, or right before he was living downstairs. But I think mostly as I was an older teenager, from sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, when I’d come and stay.
TAYLOR: But you don’t have any real recollection of him being . . .
DANIEL: No, not in here. Not in here with me. But then I wouldn’t have been allowed
38
to sleep in here. [unintelligible]. But all this stuff was like it is, the shoes and the ties. [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: Were you ever instructed not to touch anything when you were here?
DANIEL: No. Oh no.
TAYLOR: Nothing like that?
DANIEL: No, it was free rein. We didn’t break anything. But we could go where we wanted to and look at things. You know, they had no problem. My grandmother had no problem with us playing anywhere in the house, until we got up in the attic and on the roof and she walks out. [chuckling] That was the end of that.
TAYLOR: Well, we will take a look at the storage room.
DANIEL: I always thought this was a cool thing because . . .[unintelligible].
TAYLOR: It very well could have been. [sound of footsteps]
DANIEL: This is like I’ve never seen it before. This room was packed. You could hardly walk in here. I mean, it was like just brimming with stuff. This is where they put everything. There were boxes of cufflinks, and money clips, and little knickknacks, and campaign buttons, maybe even some hats and canes, and old cameras, and cards and photos—everything. Sometimes we’d come up here and just sit on the floor and poke through boxes and just see what [unintelligible]. And I think I swiped a money clip. [chuckling] It actually may be in New York somewhere. But I always asked. You know, when you took something, I could have my mother go to my grandmother
39
and say, “Can we have this?” She’d look at it and go, “Yeah. There must be two hundred others of them upstairs.” But yeah, this place is still . . .
TAYLOR: So this was a big hangout when you came?
DANIEL: Yeah. I remember being fascinated by this. It was a place that I came back to several times, because . . . You know, I discovered it once, and then ooh, [unintelligible]. Mostly when I was older. As a young child I didn’t come up here. But when I was ten, eleven, twelve, somewhere in there, I began to find these places and finally became fascinated. And even when I was older I used to come back [unintelligible] come back and look around again. When I was thirteen, twelve or thirteen, I swiped one of his hats. I asked for it and got one of his hats to take back and wear. I tore the band off it, put a bandanna around it, turned the brim down—you know, that was the style. A bad thing to do to a Harry Truman hat. [sound of footsteps]
TAYLOR: I believe we’ve covered everything here.
DANIEL: Except for the attic.
TAYLOR: Except for the attic. [unintelligible].
DANIEL: The funny thing is, I don’t remember there being stairs up to the attic. I only remember the door being right there. But that’s another one of those little glitches in memory.
TAYLOR: I have to ask this question: Did you slide down the banisters? Do you remember? You don’t?
DANIEL: Yes.
40
TAYLOR: You did?
DANIEL: Wait a minute. [unintelligible]. Yeah, I tried it once. I can remember trying it once, and I didn’t get to do it again because it was frowned upon rather quickly by my mother and grandmother, I think. I just have a memory of trying it. Of course, you could get hurt if you slid all the way down here. It’s not exactly a soft landing at the bottom. But I don’t think we slid [unintelligible]. I just know I have a vague memory of throwing my leg over the banister. That’s the main thing, on that stair landing, and sliding partway down. [unintelligible]. [sound of footsteps]
TAYLOR: You’ll probably be surprised by the attic. It is a bit less full.
DANIEL: [unintelligible]. And there’s the ladder! Yeah, it was just like [unintelligible]. I remember being amazed at how big it was. Even with all the junk in here, just all that space. Now you guys have put up this stuff, or was this all . . . ?
TAYLOR: It was here.
DANIEL: Okay.
DAGE: The plastic is an addition, but . . .
DANIEL: Okay, but all the [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: Now there’s a baby bed over in the corner.
DANIEL: There certainly is. I don’t know whose that is.
TAYLOR: Well, we think perhaps that maybe that was brought in for your younger brother. I forgot to ask, do you ever recall a nursery anywhere?
DANIEL: No. No, when we were younger, they probably would have kept the crib in
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my parents’ room, wherever they slept, either in the guest room or . . . I think they probably slept in the guest room, or in my mother’s room. They would have stayed in one of those two rooms, I think. My mother would know.
TAYLOR: Now, this room behind you is Margaret’s room. [unintelligible]. We think that [unintelligible] is your mother’s.
DANIEL: No, that’s not familiar. But it could be, yeah. A lot of things up here were covered up in here and in boxes.
TAYLOR: So you climbed up to the attic [unintelligible].
DANIEL: Yes, and this is also where I got the hat that I just told you about. It was up here. This place, I keep joking that it looked like a Harry Truman spare parts department, with the canes and hats and [unintelligible]. They had the room to save everything. Oh good, you put a fan up here. I wasn’t going to go back up there anyway.
TAYLOR: Now, did your mother come out and get you?
DANIEL: No, we found the way to the attic. We came downstairs and said, “Mom, we found the attic, and how to get out of the attic and on the roof.” She said, “Oh, my god!” She came upstairs, and . . . It was weird, because I thought she was going to yell at us. But she came after us, and we said, “Come on, you can see how to get on the roof.” And she didn’t say, “No, don’t get on the roof,” she went up the ladder. So the next thing I know, the three of us were out on the roof. [tape turned off]
TAYLOR: So your grandmother was very irate that you three were on top of the house?
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DANIEL: Yeah, not only because we had climbed through the roof with my mother . . . When did the tape run out, do we know?
TAYLOR: About at that point.
DANIEL: At that point? Okay. So we’d gotten up on the roof, with my mother. She had, for some reason, come with us instead of scolding us, and we’d all three gotten up on the roof and were just looking around. And you could see the Secret Service cameras across the street swiveling to where we were immediately. And my grandmother came out of the house just a short while later, with a Secret Service man in tow, and just started pointing to us and pointing to the roof, because we could barely hear her. She said, “Get down here.” And we all got off the roof and got out of the attic, and she locked the door of the attic. And this is the first time I’ve been back up in the attic since I was ten, twelve years old.
TAYLOR: So no more of that?
DANIEL: No, no more. No, she locked the attic up tight.
STONE: Why do you think your mother went up with you?
DANIEL: Good question. I think we kind of talked her into it, because she had done it as a child herself at about the same time that . . . Again, she had not been up in the attic since she was ten or twelve years old, and had used to gone up on . . . she hadn’t been up on the roof since she was ten or twelve years old. And so I just remember her seeming curious and having a sense of humor and a sense of adventure about it, rather than just automatically saying, “Don’t you
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do that.” And it was one of those weird things, where you suddenly see the child in your parent again. You know, there was no more lecturing us, she went with us, which was completely unheard-of. But it was the last time she did it, too.
TAYLOR: That’s primarily your only memory of the attic?
DANIEL: Yeah.
TAYLOR: It’s quite a memorable one.
DANIEL: Yeah, it certainly is. But yeah, we had come up here before to poke around. I mean, we had been up here several times just to look through things. And I guess that always happened when we were bored or we’d come back from lunch or dinner or something. You know, go amuse yourselves, and we’d just . . . “Okay.”
TAYLOR: Explore.
DANIEL: Yeah. [sound of footsteps] Now it all looks right, now that I’m standing on this landing. Of course the attic is one more flight up.
DAGE: Was the attic fan ever on when you were here, this big fan?
DANIEL: I didn’t even know there was one.
TAYLOR: Yes, I’d forgotten . . .
DANIEL: Holy moly! Oh, just look at that stuff! Wow! I don’t remember whether or not it was. My wife loves these things. She wants us to put one in. Because her grandparents had a house that had one of these big fans in the top, and it just sucked all the air out the top. And she said you didn’t need any air
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conditioning, you just left the windows open. And that’s, of course, what they used this for. But I don’t remember. I’m trying to dredge up a memory of a loud hum or something. I’ve got a vague memory that it might have been, but I may be confusing it with my wife’s house. I may be thinking of there, because they still use it, my wife’s grandparents’ house. Her aunt and uncle and their family still use one of these things. So I may be transferring memories there. I better be careful.
TAYLOR: Do you ever remember being very hot or very cold?
DANIEL: No. No, I don’t remember it being uncomfortable in the house, that I know of. Not too hot or too cold. Although I’ll tell you now, though, it feels funny to have it so cool in here, because of the air conditioning. Oooh, oooh, oooh, wait a minute, wait a minute! [unintelligible] the grate.
TAYLOR: Okay. Watch yourself. It’s sort of a construction area.
DANIEL: Yes, it certainly is, isn’t it?
DAGE: In progress.
TAYLOR: I think to your left . . .
DANIEL: Over by the toilet. Jon! Jon! You know, I’ll bet you it’s been . . . You can’t hear us over the rush of the air.
STONE: Yeah, that’s possible.
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, phooey.
STONE: It was worth a shot.
DANIEL: Yeah, because you could hear it really clearly, too. I always thought that
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bathroom was strange here, because it’s so bright and so blue compared to the rest of the upstairs.
TAYLOR: I couldn’t hear [unintelligible].
DANIEL: It’s probably because the air conditioning is [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: I guess so.
DANIEL: [sound of footsteps] Anyway, I think I put some marbles in up there. Most of the marbles went right down to the grate at your feet.
TAYLOR: [unintelligible]?
DANIEL: Yeah. Or the other one.
TAYLOR: Now supposedly your mother—
DANIEL: Yes, because I could see that. See, that’s one of the reasons I dropped them down there, so they’d go . . .
TAYLOR: Now supposedly your mother got her head caught in there one time?
DANIEL: [chuckling] Yeah, I’ve heard that. I’ve heard that. [chuckling] Ouch!
TAYLOR: Sounds like the grate was a source of fun for two generations. [chuckling]
DANIEL: For two generations, right.
TAYLOR: Okay. All right. Well, shall we go to George and May’s house?
DANIEL: Yeah! Let me take a look . . .
STONE: [unintelligible] I don’t see anybody directly out front, but you can step outside.
DANIEL: I don’t know where they would be. I do recognize them. Can I go out here?
TAYLOR: Sure.
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DANIEL: [unintelligible] keep poking my head out to see [unintelligible]. Yeah, let’s go over to Aunt Beufie’s. It’s kind of funny. [unintelligible] it’s like being back in time, but then not. It’s not the same. [inaudible]
TAYLOR: [unintelligible] we talk about the house being opened to public tours, and I think that definitely [unintelligible].
DANIEL: Right. Well, we have the upstairs [unintelligible]. That’s nice. Wasn’t that in my grandmother’s will?
TAYLOR: Yes.
DANIEL: Well, of course, the day that my mother dies—not being for another twenty-five years, hopefully—that will change?
STONE: We don’t project that we’ll be opening the second floor right now. We can probably justify it, for several reasons.
TAYLOR: [unintelligible] logistics in that.
STONE: Trying to get people upstairs and then back downstairs the same stairway, the threat to the house, just in all those . . . wear-and-tear [unintelligible]. And I think it’s something we could probably explain to visitors by stating that the second floor always was the private domain of the family, and the general public rarely if ever got up there.
DANIEL: Right, they never went up there anyway, right.
TAYLOR: How would you characterize May, your aunt?
DANIEL: She was wonderful. She was funny, full of energy. She was our pal. She was always . . . Like my grandmother, she was always on our side. She took us
47
places if we had to go. If there was some ceremony we had to go to, we hung out with Aunt Beufie. Now there’s the back yard. This is more overgrown than it used to be. This is the back yard where we were playing. All this stuff is [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: Now the garage, did you ever play in it?
DANIEL: Just to poke around, yeah. Yeah, because we’d ride the wagons, the toys, the bicycles around in the back area here, on the driveway and up into the garage and back out again, occasionally look in the cars. But mostly I just remember playing out around here. This was a place to ride a bike or pull a wagon.
STONE: Do you have any recollections of your grandfather’s last car, the ’72 Chrysler?
DANIEL: Yeah.
STONE: Did you ever go driving in it?
DANIEL: As a matter of fact, I think the ’72 Chrysler went to my father when we moved to . . . No?
STONE: Well, we’ve still got it right there.
TAYLOR: Well, let’s go take a look at it.
DANIEL: Okay. I’d like to be able to tell you if it’s the car. I don’t think it’s the car my father had. I think he had one of his earlier 1960s Chryslers. Yeah, this isn’t the one, because the one that my father had had push-button gears on the dashboard on the left side. See, this isn’t the right color. It was a beige Chrysler. But it’s huge like this one.
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STONE: And that would be one that was your grandfather’s, that he gave to your father?
DANIEL: It had been my grandfather’s car. When we moved to Washington, D.C. . . . When my father was the chief of the Washington bureau of the New York Times, we went to Washington, D.C., in 1973, throughout ’73 to ’76, the New York Times got my mother a leased Mercedes, a white Mercedes four-door sedan, just as a bribe, because she hated living in Washington. This was kind of a way to soothe the transition. So my mother got a white Mercedes and Dad got my grandfather’s old Chrysler. I believe it was my Grandfather Truman’s old Chrysler, old beige Chrysler New Yorker, with push-button gears on the side. That’s what he drove to work everyday. And I wanted it to go to college with in 1975, but they wouldn’t give it to me because they thought it was too old, and blah-blah-blah-blah.
TAYLOR: What happened to it, do you know?
DANIEL: I don’t know. I have no idea. My father would know. My father would know. He took care of that car when he moved to . . . He’d know what happened to it.
DAGE: Hi, Keith. Would you like to meet Clifton Truman Daniel? This is our law enforcement ranger, Keith Drews.
KEITH DREWS: Hi.
DANIEL: Clifton Daniel.
DREWS: Nice to meet you.
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DANIEL: Nice to meet you. We’re just going around looking at things here. I haven’t been back in twelve years, so [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: All right. Any other recollections of the garage area?
DANIEL: No, just some toys we kept . . . I guess some bicycles and stuff used to be kept in there.
TAYLOR: A wagon?
DANIEL: A wagon probably was kept in there.
STONE: Did you ever climb up into the loft?
DANIEL: What loft?
STONE: There is a loft up there.
DANIEL: In the garage? No. I didn’t even know there was one, so . . . Where is it?
STONE: I’ll bet they didn’t tell you.
DANIEL: Well, probably after the roof incident they didn’t. [chuckling]
DAGE: Over in this corner. [unintelligible].
STONE: You can see up there.
DANIEL: No. [chuckling]
TAYLOR: That’s one place perhaps you missed.
DANIEL: Yeah, boy. Isn’t that upsetting? [chuckling] No, I don’t remember that at all.
TAYLOR: I guess we can head for George and May’s house. [some inaudible and miscellaneous conversation not transcribed]
DANIEL: What we used to do is we’d make brownies. Aunt Beufie made great brownies, too. No, fudge. I’m sorry, fudge, and we brought the fudge out
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here and we’d put the pan in the snow to cool it off. [chuckling] She had a table and chairs out in here. [sound of footsteps] Obviously, this is much more recent, because we [unintelligible] gone that long.
TAYLOR: Do you have any other recollections?
DANIEL: Well, this was her living room, and that’s . . . This I don’t remember. The smell isn’t the same. The furniture is obviously all gone, so this looks strange to me. When we stayed here, we stayed in this bedroom. [sound of footsteps] This is the room that Will and I slept in. We stayed here during my grandfather’s funeral, because there was too much going on in the house, the relatives and whatever, and they put the two of us over here. Did she have a small basement?
TAYLOR: Yes.
DANIEL: Okay, that’s where we smoked cigarettes. [chuckling] I guess this was Aunt Beufie’s room. Was this her bedroom?
DAGE: [unintelligible], and this was the guest, typically. Or at least that’s the way it was during the last part of her life.
DANIEL: That may have been. They may have switched it. But I seem to remember sleeping in there. There was a pair of twin beds in there. But I don’t know, it could have been in this room. But the house doesn’t [unintelligible]. The living room looks familiar to me, but I don’t . . . I’ve got a dim memory of being in here, but nothing specific. There’s nothing . . . Mostly what I remember is [unintelligible] places that we . . . when we came over to see
51
her, that’s where we sat. And she was a good cook. She’d make, you know, like I said, the brownies. I remember sitting there . . . When we ate breakfast over here, we’d sit at that little table. She had a little teeny table in that front hall, and it was just enough that two people could sit at either end and you could still walk by.
TAYLOR: Would she join you for Christmas or Thanksgiving?
DANIEL: Yeah! Oh yeah, she was at the house, and we’d see her over here too. Oh, she must have been there, because she’s part of the family. Her house has always been [unintelligible]. But yeah, she was always around.
TAYLOR: Do you recall any of the Truman relatives coming to visit and to eat with you?
DANIEL: No, not specifically. I don’t know them now. I’m sure I met a lot of them when I was very young. They’d come by the house, because we’d be here for a week or two weeks and they’d bring relatives by. I remember meeting a lot of people, but nobody . . . The ones that were constant were Aunt Beufie and my grandmother and grandfather, obviously, and Vietta, Arletta . . . I don’t remember a lot of other memories.
STONE: How about your Aunt Natalie from next door?
TAYLOR: You probably didn’t meet her.
DANIEL: [unintelligible]?
TAYLOR: She died in 1960.
DANIEL: Okay, I would have been three, so I probably wouldn’t remember her.
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TAYLOR: So the other house you don’t have any recollection of?
DANIEL: No. Is it right next door?
TAYLOR: Yes, it’s right next door.
DANIEL: Well, obviously I have a big font of memories for that one.
TAYLOR: Well, I don’t think you would have had any occasion to go there, because it would have been rented out by the time you were around.
DANIEL: Have you still got all of Aunt Beufie’s furniture? [unintelligible]
DAGE: No. We have a few pieces.
DANIEL: What happened?
DAGE: They had an estate sale [unintelligible] to use for her care in the nursing home. We have a few pieces, I think about ten or twelve pieces [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: I wanted to ask you what your other brothers are doing. That’s one of the most-asked questions: Where is your mother, and what are your other brothers doing?
DANIEL: My mother lives in Manhattan with my father, in the same apartment they have lived in since I was born. And my next youngest brother, Will, is getting ready to start for his master’s degree in psychology at New York University, and he has . . . For about the last six years, he has run an advocacy agency for the homeless in New York. It started out as a voter registration drive, homeless voter . . . I think it was homeless voter of ’89 or homeless voter of ’88, but he started to register homeless people to vote so
53
they would have a say in laws affecting them although they had no address. And then he expanded to do some other things for them as an advocacy agency. And Harrison is in a group home in Mount Kisco, New York. That’s where he lives.
Harrison was born two months prematurely, two or two and a half months prematurely, and he had some developmental problems. He has always been in special schools and whatever. He was always the most good-natured of all of us, and still is.
And Thomas is living in Vermont, and has just finished a business degree, and has just quit his job as a manager of a record store in Burlington, Vermont, and is getting ready . . . Hopefully he’s got a job prospect as a regional representative for a record and tape distribution company. So he’d get the Vermont region or a couple of states. Anyway, they live on a ten-acre spread with a nice big house and a pond, and three Alaskan huskies and a chicken coop full of chickens.
TAYLOR: I’ve got one question that’s maybe interesting. Your father has written his book, Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, and I quote, “Whatever my demerits as a son-in-law, I have never felt that I fully penetrated that circle of solidarity formed by the three Trumans.” What do you think he meant?
DANIEL: They were very close and very private. I don’t know, I got the feeling he was pretty much in there.
TAYLOR: I think he was, too.
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DANIEL: Actually, it’s funny, they are very private people. My mother keeps her affairs to herself. But that’s what he may have been talking about, was just that close . . . the bond between the three of them.
TAYLOR: Yes. Well, he mentions on the first occasion that he met your grandmother and your grandfather that the loyalty, I think, was the first thing that he recognized as a quality, and perhaps I think that’s what he is referring to.
DANIEL: When he had that first meeting, he had come back from Russia as a correspondent and he had an ulcer from dealing with the Russian bureaucracy. And my grandfather didn’t trust men who didn’t drink at least something, who couldn’t hold their liquor. And so they went out for a drink together, my mother and my grandfather and my father. And the waiter came over, and my grandfather ordered bourbon and branch water, whatever he was drinking, my mother ordered a gin and tonic or whatever, and my father ordered milk. My mother said, “You should have seen your grandfather’s face. Because not only was he a journalist but he was drinking milk.” I thought that was their first meeting, but my grandfather and my grandmother would be a different story.
TAYLOR: What was your first remembrance of your grandfather?
DANIEL: The first one is sort of a manufactured one. It’s one that I’ve been helped to remember by my parents.
TAYLOR: The rocking horse?
DANIEL: The one of the rocking horse, the rocking horse incident in the living room in
55
New York when he was baby-sitting for us. My parents were gone for nine weeks on a European vacation, and my grandparents came to stay part of the time in New York with us. He was reading the paper in the morning and I was rocking on the rocking horse. I was riding it too hard and I tipped it over. My grandmother came running out of the kitchen, and I saw all that comfort coming, and maybe possibly a glass of milk and some cookies, or something like that, so I started crying. And my grandfather stopped my grandmother, stopped her from picking me up, and said, “Don’t touch him,” and then turned to me and said, “You’re not hurt. You’re all right, you get up and start riding that again.” And I did. I stopped crying and got up on the horse again. He always had that effect on me.
TAYLOR: And do you have a first remembrance of your grandmother? Anything special that sticks out?
DANIEL: No, that would have been the first time for both of them, when she was coming from the kitchen. Yeah, but it’s not real clear. Like I said, it’s not a real clear memory. I have more memories of her when she was older, and even after he died, because we spent more time with her specifically. It’s funny, she was as private to us as she was to everybody else.
TAYLOR: So when you came, did you come back more often after your grandfather died, or was [unintelligible]?
DANIEL: No, less, unfortunately. The last ten years of my grandmother’s life, we weren’t out here a lot. And I’ve always felt bad about that, like I wanted to
56
come more often, [unintelligible].
TAYLOR: Did each of your brothers have nicknames? I know we touched upon one. I know yours was Kiffie.
DANIEL: Oh god, if I tell you those and then they wind up as part of the tour, they’ll kill me.
STONE: We can strike that from the record.
DANIEL: Yeah, they did have nicknames, but theirs didn’t stick the way mine did. Kiffie was the only one that . . . I mean, that stuck with me until I was thirty, for goodness sakes. I had to tell my mother, “Stop it!”
TAYLOR: Do you remember anything about Key West, your visits?
DANIEL: Yeah! Oh yeah.
TAYLOR: What did you normally do?
DANIEL: Well, we didn’t do the normal things that children do when they go to Key West. We went on submarines and battleships, and we had dinners at the commandant’s house on the naval base. So we didn’t have a run-of-the-mill . . . We played in the swimming pool with the Secret Service, went on walks with Harry Truman--you know, the usual thing, what every kid does on vacation when he goes to Key West. [chuckling] But those are just some of the things. That’s where I got my first artichoke, at a dinner at the commandant’s house in Key West. We were at a table with a bunch of other kids and they gave me this spiny thing to eat. I actually liked it because it was a challenge. But going on submarines, going on a submarine, going on a
57
battleship. You know, we got to see some cool things when we were down there. We went to Cape Kennedy, Kennedy Space Center, and got taken around NASA by a Tom Stafford, a Gemini astronaut, and got to sit in the mockup, the training module of the Apollo. I wanted to be an astronaut for years after that.
TAYLOR: Did your grandfather have any special things that he liked to do in Key West?
DANIEL: No. Walk, just be there. He just liked being there. I’ve read, and I didn’t see it firsthand, but I read that he really felt good when he was down there. It just kind of refreshed him. I know he liked that place.
TAYLOR: And your grandmother?
DANIEL: Nothing special that I can remember. They stayed at a house at one end of the street, we stayed on the grounds of a hotel in Key West belonging to Senator Spottswood. The street was barricaded off and the house had been rented for them at the end of the street, a dead-end, so that they could have some privacy down there, and the police patrolled the street so that they wouldn’t feel . . . And we’d go down there and have meals with them and talk to them and go on walks on the beach and stuff like that. He had press conferences while he was there. My parents took us out to dinner to restaurants. The restaurants they’d take us to, and we might all go out, but I don’t remember my grandparents going out too much, because the driving around was . . . By that time he was getting older and he didn’t want to go
58
falling all over the place.
TAYLOR: And the visits to New York?
DANIEL: Those are real fuzzy. You know, that they came to New York. Those are when I was much younger. As he got older, we came out here more often. So the visits to New York, they came for Christmas for quite a few years in a row, but then we started coming out here. I think we might have traded a couple of times--you know, they’d come to us for Christmas [unintelligible]—but I don’t know the exact dates, like which year we did come out here and which year we stayed there.
TAYLOR: How would you characterize your mother? Can you describe her?
DANIEL: My mother? My mother is a complicated person. It’s kind of hard for me to describe her in just a few sentences. It really is. She’s very loyal, fiercely loyal, very private. That’s pretty much it. You really threw me a curve on that one. That’s part of what I’m doing in this book is trying to figure out my parents.
TAYLOR: Well, we’ll have to read your book. How would you characterize your father? I think he’s very interesting.
DANIEL: Oooh, yeah. Outgoing, talkative, hardworking, loves to be in the middle of a conversation. You go to a party with both of them . . . I went to a party, my wife and I went to a party with both of them, and my father walked into the middle of the crowd in the middle of the room, and stopped dead, and started talking to the first person that said hello. I was right behind him. My mother
59
and my wife went to the table in the back, got themselves each a glass of white wine, and sat in a corner as far away from everybody as they could, and they were perfectly happy. My father and I were just like, “Hi! How are you?” We were talking to everybody in the middle of the room. So he’s very outgoing, very knowledgeable. He’s a born journalist. He loves to learn things and tell them to other people. He’s just a conduit for information. Also a snappy dresser.
TAYLOR: Your grandfather, I think, followed suit somewhat, too.
DANIEL: As a snappy dresser? Oh yeah.
TAYLOR: He did quite well.
DANIEL: Oh yeah.
TAYLOR: Let’s see, closing here, I think. Grandfathers are known for their advice that they give. Did your grandfather ever give you any?
DANIEL: Not a word.
TAYLOR: Not a word?
DANIEL: Not anything specific. I’m sure there was lots of little advice, like “Get your feet off the table,” don’t do that, don’t . . . But nothing. No, no pearls of wisdom, that I can remember.
TAYLOR: How would you characterize him, from what you know, your life?
DANIEL: Well, all that’s common knowledge. I think he’s known pretty well: hardworking, straightforward, no-nonsense. He was like that for us. Like that incident I told you about when he said to come and say hello. “Oh, do it
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Daniel. Let’s get on here.” Not in a grumpy or cranky way. He just . . . let’s get to it. Even as a very old man, I just remember him as having energy about him. Even when he had a cane and was walking slowly, it didn’t seem like he was moving that slowly.
TAYLOR: He accompanied your father, I believe . . .
[End Tape 1, Side B - Begin Tape 2, Side A]
TAYLOR: . . . he was eighty years old and he was on the Acropolis steps with his cane.
DANIEL: Yes.
TAYLOR: Always very industrious. How have you translated his example into your own life?
DANIEL: I’m still trying to do that. My grandfather once said that presidents shouldn’t have descendants, because the descendants would spend the rest of their lives having people expect them to live up to their ancestors. That has happened to me, but only from my own expectations. You wind up with a little second-hand fame, you kind of get poisoned, at least I did, in wondering what I should do with my life. And I think the conclusion that I’m coming to is that it doesn’t matter. There are certain ways, there are certain things about him that I try to emulate, but I’m not going to try and follow his footsteps exactly. And he wouldn’t want that. He actually wanted me to be a senator. I don’t think he’s going to get his way. [chuckling]
TAYLOR: Do you have any other . . . ?
STONE: I think that’s a fine note to close on.
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TAYLOR: All right.
END OF INTERVIEW