HARRY TRUMAN’S BAH-HUMBUG CHRISTMAS OF 1945
On December 26, 1945, to mark the holiday season, President Harry Truman posed for photographers holding an armful of presents outside the family’s Independence home.
BY BRIAN BURNES
He was the leader of the free world and he would be home for Christmas.
That’s what Harry Truman, alone in Washington, decided. In the earliest days of presidential air travel, he authorized a dicey flight through winter storms to Kansas City on December 25, 1945.
A photograph of Truman taken the following day just outside his family’s Independence home - cradling an armful of presents with a wide smile - presented the personification of the bountiful life put on hold during the world war that had ended only months before.
Behind the home’s front door, however, the mood was way more bah humbug. Upon returning from Washington the president had found a scornful spouse, not impressed with his efforts to bring in the holiday right.
“So you’ve finally arrived,” Bess Truman told her husband. “I guess you couldn’t think of any more reasons to stay away.
“As far as I’m concerned, you might as well have stayed in Washington.”
From the perspective of 2024, Truman’s 1945 holiday looks like the white Christmas that no one was dreaming of - an icy post-World War II case of contemporary holiday stress.
Perhaps it started with unrealistic expectations of yuletide bliss bumping up against the pressures of presidential imperatives, leading to a marital spat, complicated by concerns over health and workaholic fatigue.
“Peace is Hell”
Truman’s holiday angst occurred at the end of 1945, a year defined by months of war-related dread and exhaustion, as well as hopes for a return to normalcy that wouldn’t arrive soon enough.
On Christmas Eve, President Truman had tried to say the right thing to his fellow Americans.
On December 24, 1945, President Harry Truman pressed the button that illuminated the National Christmas Tree. Lighting the tree with electricity had been suspended during World War II.
“This is the Christmas that a war-weary world has prayed for through long and awful years,” Truman said while participating in the lighting of the National Christmas Tree on the south lawn of the White House.
“It is therefore fitting for us to remember that the spirit of Christmas is the spirit of peace, of love, of charity to all men,” he added.
Still, the national holiday mood was surly.
All had celebrated upon the surrender of Germany in May and Japan in August. Yet the awkward conversion from a wartime to peacetime economy had included strikes by auto, coal and oil workers.
There also was a housing shortage, as the first veterans to return from their various fronts found few apartments to rent. On Christmas Day in Colorado, more than 100 homeless veterans and their families had picketed Denver City Hall carrying signs that read “We Can’t Live in Foxholes Here.”
All that circling anger and frustration needed a place to land, and the new president served nicely. That December, Truman had told an dinner audience in Washington that the famous remark attributed to Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman was in error.
“I’m telling you that peace is hell,” he said.
Making it worse was Truman’s personal isolation.
After becoming president following Franklin Roosevelt’s sudden death on April 12, 1945, Truman often had found himself alone in the White House, as wife Bess and daughter Margaret routinely had returned to Independence.
“I sit here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches - all the while listening to the ghosts walking up and down the hallways and even right here in the study,” Truman wrote Bess that June.
On December 4, 1945, Bess Truman, in her new role as First Lady, had appeared at an event promoting Christmas Seals, an annual charitable campaign. She and her daughter Margaret would return to Independence on December 19.
For Christmas 1945, Bess and Margaret had returned to Independence from Washington on December 19. As detailed in a 1986 biography of her mother by Margaret Truman Daniel, the president planned to stay in the White House to monitor a post-war Moscow conference of foreign ministers.
This would allow his wife and daughter to enjoy almost a week in Independence without the crush of press the president would bring with him when he returned on Christmas.
Harry Truman had always observed the holiday.
“Bessie, if my dear men friends who invited themselves to dinner here Christmas go home on the afternoon train, I am going to try and see you Christmas evening if you are home,” Truman wrote his future wife, Elizabeth Wallace of Independence, on December 21, 1911, from the Truman farm in Grandview.
They married in 1919, and Margaret was born in 1924. The only family Christmas celebrations Truman apparently missed were those of 1917 and 1918, while he was serving in the U.S. Army during World War I.
But Truman awoke December 25, 1945 to a sleet storm. After a four-hour delay at Washington’s National Airport, Truman’s plane took off anyway.
But the president landed only to find an angry wife in Independence. One likely reason for Bess’s exasperation was her constant worry about her husband’s health, especially when dealing with work-related stress.
Headaches and Upset Stomachs
The 1945 Christmas quarrel should be considered in context of his grandmother’s concern about the president’s well-bring and how overwork sometimes had affected him, said Clifton Truman Daniel, the former president’s eldest grandson.
Beginning in the 1920s, while serving as Jackson County presiding judge, Truman had begun to suffer headaches. In part to seek relief from those, Truman began attending summer camps for U.S. Army reserve officers, often at Fort Riley, Kansas.
“Have the headaches quit? ”, Bess wrote her husband in 1926 while he was away.
“I surely hope so.”
The stress of his job likely contributed to his grandfather’s discomfort, according to Daniel.
”Once he had to lay off a number of county workers which made him sick to his stomach,” Daniel said.
“He also was part of the (Tom) Pendergast machine and had to deal with all of the corruption, and so the summer Army camps were always a great rest for him, allowing him to spend a couple of weeks riding horses and eating decent food.”
Truman served as presiding judge from 1927 through 1935, and beyond the regular demands of the position was the misery the Great Depression visited upon his constituents whom, in desperation, often reached out to the county’s chief administrator. In February, 1931, Truman scheduled a personal escape to Little Rock, Arkansas, missing the birthdays of both his wife and daughter.
“I don’t know whether you entirely appreciate or not the tremendous amount of strain on me since November,” Truman wrote Bess, referencing his 1930 re-election as presiding judge.
“My head hasn’t ached and I’ve slept like a baby because I know the phone’s not going to ring and that no one’s gong to stop me with a tale of woe when I walk down the street.”
Work was Harry Truman’s default mode, Daniel said.
“Someone once asked Grandpa how he relaxed and he smiled and said ‘Work.’ ”
Once elected to the U.S. Senate in 1934, Truman maintained the same habit of working 14-hour days, accompanied by the occasional spells of headache and fatigue.
In 1937, during a bitter debate over the proposed expansion of the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Sen. Joseph Robinson of Arkansas, Senate Majority Leader and a principal advocate of President Roosevelt’s high court plan, had been found dead in his Washington apartment from an apparent heart attack.
That prompted Bess to ask her husband to visit a Washington area naval hospital and then, later that same year, an Army clinic in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
She sometimes would grow exasperated, however, when she wondered whether she was getting the full story from her husband regarding what doctors may have told him.
“I’m afraid you have been holding out on me,” she wrote him later that year.
This dynamic continued. In 1940, while attending the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Truman suddenly lost his strength and had to grip an auditorium railing for 15 minutes before somebody noticed he needed help.
He only admitted to this episode some 18 months later, according to Margaret Truman Daniel.
But he continued to follow the same crushing work regimen after agreeing in 1944 to serve as Roosevelt’s vice presidential running mate, and then after becoming president following Roosevelt’s death.
Transitioning to the demands of being chief executive proved hard on the Truman family. That summer Truman left for Potsdam, Germany to meet with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin regarding the postwar reorganization of Europe.
A pre-departure phone call with Bess apparently did not go well.
“I am as blue as indigo about going,” Truman wrote on July 6, 1945.
“You didn’t seem at all happy when we talked. I’m sorry if I’ve done something to make you unhappy. All I’ve ever tried to do is make you pleased with me and the world. I’m very much afraid that I’ve failed miserably.”
Truman’s commitment to his responsibilities, however, wasn’t the only problem.
Aboard the Sacred Cow
Harry Truman was the first president to fly on a regular basis.
His interest in the U.S. Army’s aviation efforts had begun in there 1920s, to the dismay of his wife.
“Please promise me you won’t go up with any of those aviators…” she once wrote to him while he was away at summer reserve camp.
“My grandmother never liked airplanes,” Daniel said. “My grandfather had no such fear.”
Traveling by air during the 1930s could be uncomfortable and expensive, and comparatively few members of the regular public did so. Also, Kansas City area residents grew especially familiar with commercial air tragedies.
The 1931 death of Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne, flying in an aircraft out of Kansas City that crashed in Chase County, Kansas, had prompted a federal review of commercial air travel. In 1935 U.S. Sen. Bronson Cutting of New Mexico died when his flight to Washington crashed in a heavy fog in Macon County, in north central Missouri.
Truman often flew as a senator.
On Christmas Day, 1945, President Truman’s plane, the “Sacred Cow,” was waiting for him at Washington’s National Airport. The flight crew waited four hours for the snowy weather to clear before taking off.
Then, as president, he enjoyed access to the “Sacred Cow,” a four-propeller plane built by Douglas Aircraft in 1944, outfitted with bullet-proof glass and a 12-foot stateroom that seated seven.
The plane awaited Truman on Christmas morning of 1945. But a sleet storm had canceled commercial flights out of Washington’s National Airport. Truman’s flight crew spent close to four hours waiting for a break in the weather that never came.
Truman decided to fly out anyway.
Many Americans, including First Lady Bess Truman, long had been nervous about air travel. But on Christmas Day, President Truman gave onlookers a reassuring wave goodbye.
At about noon Washington time, the Sacred Cow “boomed down the runway in a driving sleet storm with slush above the rim of the plane’s landing gear,” according to the New York Times.
Occasionally, throughout the six-hour flight, “de-icing equipment threw large hunks of ice from the ship’s propellers back against the fuselage,” the Times added.
The plane landed at Kansas City’s Municipal Airport just before 5 p.m.
The flight, the Times insisted, represented “one of the most hazardous ‘sentimental journeys’ ever undertaken by an American chief of state.”
Eighteen journalists, with about a dozen Secret Service agents - all pressed into Christmas duty - had followed Truman in a separate plane that arrived several hours after Truman had touched down.
So it wasn’t just the New York Times that was grumpy.
After landing in Kansas City President Truman went to the family home in Independence, which was icy both outside and inside.
“The example he set was a bad one, insofar as safe flying is concerned,” said the Washington Star.
But Truman would make it up to at least some of those reporters.
Presidential Order: “Burn it.”
On the morning after Christmas, James “Bud” Porter, then serving in the Kansas City Star’s Independence office, waited outside the Truman Home, just in case there was a sudden Truman sighting.
“I was out there, being a local guy, but the guys from Washington had kind of slept in,” Porter said in a 1975 Truman Library oral history.
During the Truman years the Star had placed a telephone in a residential porch just across the Truman Home, and near the house shared by Nellie and Ethel Noland, Truman’s cousins.
Porter, accompanied by a Star photographer, was watching the Truman Home when he saw the front door open.
“About 9 or 9:30 in the morning, here (Truman) came out with a whole armload of Christmas packages, walking across the street towards the Nolands, all by himself, no Secret Service men, nobody,” Porter said.
The photographer shot a picture and then left for the Star building downtown. The photo soon appeared on the front page of the afternoon edition.
Then members of Truman’s traveling press pool started to hear from their editors, who wanted their own photograph of Truman and his armful of Christmas gifts.
“So it caused quite a furor and some of the guys got some real hard times over that,” Porter said.
Word of this got back to Truman. At about 3 p.m. the president reappeared holding another bundle of presents.
“Now I know dang well that Truman didn’t have any idea of coming out in the afternoon with another armload of packages,” Porter said.
“But he just did it so the guys could get a picture.”
Truman soon returned to the White House, where he wrote an apparently ill-tempered letter to his wife and sent it special delivery, a postal service that then promised swifter mail service than usual.
Truman reconsidered the next day and managed to get his daughter Margaret on the phone. Truman told her to go to the Independence post office and ask Edgar Hinde, a longtime Truman friend who served as the local postmaster, to hand the letter over to her before it was delivered to the family home at 219 North Delaware Avenue.
“It’s a very angry letter and I’ve decided I don’t want her to see it,” Truman told his daughter.
“Burn it.”
Margaret did as directed, retrieving the letter and placing it in a backyard incinerator.
Truman then wrote what Margaret described as one of her father’s “most important letters” to Bess Truman.
“Well I’m here in the White House, the great white sepulcher of ambitions and reputations,” he wrote on December 28.
“When you told me me I might as well have stayed in Washington so far as you were concerned, I gave up…”
He later added:
“You can never appreciate what it means to come home as I did the other evening after doing at least 100 things I didn’t want to do and have the only person in the world whose approval and good opinion I value look at me like I’m something the cat dragged in and tell me I’ve come in at last because I couldn’t find any reason to stay away.”
He went on to plead for her patience and support, as fate had rendered him to be the president.
“If that is the case you, Margie and everyone else who may have any influence on my actions must give me help and assistance, because no one ever needs help and assistance as I do now.”
But the president never mailed this letter.
Truman Library archivists found it 27 years later in his office desk, upon Truman’s 1972 death.
It was, Margaret Truman Daniel wrote, the only one of the approximately 1,600 surviving letters that he wrote to Bess that he had kept there.
Maintaining harmony on the home front was a Harry Truman priority, Clifton Truman Daniel said.
The following year - December 25, 1946 - Bess and Margaret Truman welcomed the president back home for a presumably less stressful Christmas.
“Grandpa always said that he could not do the job if not for the stable and supportive home life he had to come back to,” Daniel said.
In 1972 Truman suffered from various ailments and doctors admitted him to Kansas City’s Research Medical Center on December 5. Truman was then 88 years old. As Christmas approached, bulletins described Truman as suffering from lung congestion, heart irregularity, kidney blockages and a failing digestive system.
He grew weaker on Christmas Eve and was reported to be in a deep coma on Christmas day.
According to the Star, he died at 7:50 a.m. on December 26.
A slightly different version of this story first appeared on FlatlandKC, the digital nonprofit news site operated by Kansas City PBS, and appears here with the its permission. To read more FlatlandKC articles, go to flatlandkc.org
All photographs courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum
Brian Burnes is the former President of the Jackson County Historical Society.