A Lady in the White House

Bess Truman: 1885-1982

Her husband called her “the boss” and “my chief adviser.” But months after Harry Truman became President in 1945, First Lady Bess went shopping in Washington’s big department stores and no one recognized her. That was the way she wanted it, and to a surprising extent that was the way it stayed.

Bess Truman, who died last week at 97, went to Washington a Mid-western housewife who had lived all her life under the same roof with her mother. She did not smoke or drink or swear. She liked Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott but thought modern novels “a waste of time.” After her husband succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House, Bess burned a stack of Harry’s love letters. “But think of history,” Harry protested. “I have,” she said.

The fifth generation of a prosperous family in Independence, Mo., Elizabeth Wallace Truman grew up a blue-eyed, blond-curled tomboy. She could bat a ball as far as any boy in the neighborhood and was better than any at mumblety-peg. She met her future husband when he was six and she was five and he always said he fell in love at that moment. They did not marry until 29 years later, partly because her mother opposed this boy of no “family” and sparse prospects. Engaged just before Harry left for World War I, they wed on his return in 1919. The Trumans stayed married for 53 years, through a failed business, shabby local politics and Harry’s sudden rise to the leadership of the postwar world, which Bess found the greatest burden of all.

She always insisted that her husband’s eminence had nothing to do with her. She did not give press conferences. She refused to sit for her official White House portrait, and it had to be done from a photograph. Only intimate friends were allowed into the family quarters. She preserved every protocol and precedent established before her, not out of any instinctive formality but because she would not rock the boat.

Mrs. Truman figured in two major controversies: Harry’s putting her on his Senate payroll in 1941 at $4,500 a year, almost half his Senate salary; and her acceptance while First Lady of a gift freezer that was linked to an alleged influence-peddling scandal. Neither issue did her much harm. During a Senate probe of the Democratic freezer flap, the highly partisan Republican Joseph R. McCarthy called her one of the “finest things about the White House” and declared her above suspicion.

Stiff” and shy in crowds, she could be slyly witty in private. When her husband was contemplating the propriety of their having dinner in a Rome restaurant that was once the villa of Mussolini’s mistress Carla Petacci, Mrs. Truman settled the matter: “Well, after all, she won’t be there.” Bess endured thousands of teas, receptions and galas. Mobbed by delegates and newsmen at the 1944 Democratic Convention that nominated Truman for Vice President, she lamented, “Are we going to have to go through this all the rest of our lives?” Eight and a half years later, after a crowd of 15,000 greeted the retired President and First Lady on their return to Independence, she said to her husband, “If this is what you get for all those years of hard work, I guess it was worth it.”

She was always the lady. Harry said Texans who voted for Richard Nixon could “go to hell,” she telephoned and told him, “If you can’t talk politer than that in public, you come right home.” But she kept her views private. When asked on national TV in 1955 if she had anything to say about politics “specifically or in general,” she shot back, “Not in either category, thank you.” Last and first, a lady. —By William A. Henry III

HOSPITALIZED. Jennifer O’Neill, 34, former fashion model and sultry star of the film Summer of ’42; for abdominal surgery to remove a bullet, after she accidentally shot herself; in Bedford Hills, N. Y.

DIED. Mario del Monaco, 67, celebrated, booming-voiced tenor who was most renowned for his rendition of Verdi’s Otello, which he played in 427 performances; of a heart attack; in Mestre, Italy. Blessed with a magnificent though sometimes unsubtle voice, the virtuoso proclaimed, “When I sang, people would not say they were going to hear Otello or Tosca, but Del Monaco.” He was buried in his Otello costume while the funeral hymns were sung by his own recorded voice.

DIED. Pierre Mendès France, 75, Premier of France (1954-55) and respected godfather of the French left; of a heart attack; in Paris. A brilliant lawyer, courageous World War II pilot and intellectual,

Mendès France believed his country should forget its grand imperial illusions and curb centralized executive power. During his brief, 7½-month tenure as Premier, he pledged to end France’s Indochina war within one month (and did so), gave autonomy to Tunisia and persuaded France’s National Assembly to approve West German rearmament. Often politically unpopular because of his abrasive righteousness, Mendès France earned numerous enemies (including Charles de Gaulle) and was sometimes ridiculed, notably for his ill-starred recommendation that the bibulous French switch from wine to milk. But said Disciple François Mitterrand at his 1981 inauguration as President: “It is thanks to you that this is possible.”

DIED. Hans Selye, 75, Vienna-born endocrinologist and the world’s foremost authority on stress; in Montreal. Experiments on rats led him to theories about stress, which he explored in 33 books (including Stress Without Distress, 1974). The body’s physical response to stress—alarm, resistance and exhaustion—can cause disease and death, Selye demonstrated. He contended that modern humans are no more its victims than were cave dwellers and suggested that by learning to control stress “people could live past 100.”

DIED. Siegmund Warburg, 80, energetic German-born banker who startled the closed-door world of London merchant banking with his unorthodox innovations; in London. The cultured scion of a centuries-old Jewish financial dynasty, Warburg fled Nazi Germany for London in 1934. In 1939 he founded his own trading company and in 1946 his own bank. Combining Teutonic discipline with new ideas, he managed the first U.S. corporate-bond issue in Europe and masterminded Tube Investments’ and Reynolds Metals’ takeover of British Aluminium.