It is still a controversial story. I wanted to know more about it. It was a puzzle for me. That is why i chose truman. I am going to come back to mr. Truman, but it is interesting that this is the first time you have ever been on television. I think most people have not been on television, a country of 320 million people, this is my first time. I know, being with you, i will enjoy it. The audience needs to know up front that you were married to a man that was on television a lot. Yes, he was. My wonderful husband, who died three years ago, who wrote, i think, marvelous books and was a great teacher. He was the one on television. I was never on television. David Herbert Donald. A man with three first names. Except herbert is a family name. His mother was a herbert. His mother loved her side of the family and he wanted to memorialize that side of the family. When he was given the name herbert it was never a first name. It was a family name. He never used it until very late. The story is very simple. When our son was born we set up a trust for his education and things like that. He had to use his full name legally. He put herbert in and said, i guess i had better start using it in my books and everywhere else. I said, i do not really like it. He said, that is my name now. Where did you get the name aida . I got the name from the italian my parents were italian. My mother came here as a baby. My father came here at age 21. They would not let him leave italy until he served in the army. It was a formative experience for him. Because he was very tall, and he was conscripted and was put in the kings guard. Wherever the king went in italy, my father was part of his cavalry. The king spent a lot of time in at milan, among other places. My father became a great opera lover, so when his second daughter was born, he named me aida. It comes from la scala, from the little king who allowed his little cavalry to go everywhere with him and loved music. In the book, one of the first things, i guess i had never seen it before i learned that Harry Trumans wife, bess, had a father that committed suicide. What impact did that have on the story . When did you find that out . That had a great impact on bess. First of all, she was so sad and so depressed, and her mother was so humiliated by having a husband who took his own life. In those days, it affected the whole family and reputation. She took the family and went to colorado for a year. She escaped with the kids. The humiliation was so great. All of her life bess truman was afraid the story would get out. It was thought you were insane and therefore you carried an insane gene children and grandchildren. Harry decided to go into public life and she was very unhappy. She said, the story might get out. He said, i will protect you as much as i can. He never told his daughter the episode of the suicide until she was a grown woman. She resented that, but she got over it. Bess like public life because there was this dark secret that would come out and humiliate her and, in the fact, say her genes were impure. But it never came out. Harry protected it and went to his grave and she did it was not public knowledge. Where did you find it . It is in these papers. The truman papers, the letters. It is not hidden in the papers. It is just there. There are also, in the papers, stories about how her friends helped her get over it. She was a young girl, a teenager, when this happened. Her friends did their best to comfort her. They said they could not do anything she would not be comforted. It was such a smashing of that for that family. Why did you spend not so much time but a lot of time on harry truman pursuing bess . Wallace . Was that the last name . Bess wallace i do not know what it was about harry who claimed at age six he fell in love with his blond girl with curls and blue eyes. She sat in the class ahead of me i never let anyone else on my life. And he never did. He had no girlfriend, it was just bess. I do not know enough about the psychology of a man who will all of his life wait for a woman he was 35 when he married her. She had boyfriends. She had wealthy boyfriends. But she did not marry them. I think what held her back was the possibility that they might find out after she married them about the suicide. We do not know, but she said no to all of them. She was for the time quite old by the time Harry Married her 34 years old, in the 1920s you were an old maid. But harry never let go. It may have been that if you are harry you chase something that you might not get, it might have been that he was such a romantic, and he was a romantic. He was in 19th century figure more than a 20thcentury figure. It may be his romantic side was so great. She was, by the way, a very pretty woman. She was athletic, played tennis, she ran, and she was more athletic than he was. She was quite a good catch except for this dark dimension. I tried to figure out what it was, but it was just a combination of chasing something he probably thought he could never have, which psychologically must mean something, and then the romance. He truly loved her. No doubt about that. Why did she hate politics and washington so much . She hated it because she was made fun of. The ladies of washington did not like the way she dressed, did not like how her hair was done. They thought she was a rube. After all, he did not gain acceptance he was shunned by almost all of washington and most of the senators because he came from a corrupt background. They let her now at one point that you do not wear seersucker if you are a first lady. She responded, what is wrong with seersucker . It was a series of incidents like that that made her hate washington. She would only stay there a minimal number of months in the year when harry was senator. Even when he became president , she did not like washington. The grandson has been just put together a collection of letters he found in the house in books. He claims she loved being a senators wife. I put that in the book the book was finished but i managed to get it in the notes. I did not find that she really enjoyed being in washington. So we have a conundrum. Do you still live on lincoln road in lincoln, massachusetts . I still live in the house. I still have the beautiful library. What i have been doing since we have 13,000 books in the house, i have been giving away books to archives, libraries, the Lincoln Museum and library, and small black colleges whoever might need books. My good friend kathleen nichols, with her, we have been writing to places, saying, what would you like . I have given away 3000 or 4000 so far, but have a long way to go. Depending on how long i keep the house or whether i die in it and my son inherits a, he can always give the books to a Favorite Charity of mine, books for africa. They can take all of it if they want. Certainly, africas libraries. How long were you editor in chief of harvard books . I work at Harvard Press 27 years. I was what i call what you call an acquiring editor you look for authors, you do not edit them. I became executive editor and editor in chief for perhaps a dozen years under two different directors. What did you learn in that job that you apply to either your book on Teddy Roosevelt or your book on harry truman . First of all, you learn something about writing. I read hundreds of manuscripts over the years. Good writing and what is not good writing. I was very particular. If even famous authors submitted a manuscript and it was badly written, i would turn it down or sake, please get some help, get yourself an editor and rewrite this. It is an interesting story but it is badly written. I made a few enemies by doing that. Then there were the authors who wrote like a dream. I love publishing them. I instituted a very large Translation Program at harvard. I had the power to do this. We probably published the most important history books coming out of france over a 10 or 12 your period. What the french were riding about what was called the longue duree, history over 400 or 500 years, not history of yesterday one of the series was a history of private life. It was an enormous success. What is private life . What we mean by it . The History Book Club took it up as a main selection, but we saw tens of thousands of copies of that book. A wonderful translator who was young and later won lots of prizes arthur goldhammer. Then we published the history of women again, the history of youth, which had not been done before. That was one of the things i did as editor in chief. I had enormous power to acquire books, right the contracts, work with foreign publishers, work with agents. I loved it. That was in addition to the publishing i imported a lot of books from england. Of course, i cultivated american authors. I worked in history, political science, sociology, and constitutional law. I was interested in all these. I published people from the law school, as well as great historians over the years. I once published seven authors out of the Yale Political Science Department in one year. Yale almost had a fit. How about the harvard people . They said, what is going on . Let me go back to this book. One of the things i wrote down was that harry truman, according to your book, had a psychosomatic illness. What does that mean . Harry truman was able to cope with being part of this political machine that was corrupt and sometimes violent because his ethics, he got them from his mother, were very high and he had to do favors for the machine, which meant faulty contracts, giving 10,000, whatever the boss asked, from time to time. The only way he could cope with himself was by being a divided self. He was in his own eyes and ethical man, always a poor man, he never took a dime. What happened is he developed illnesses, dyspeptic, migraine headaches, terrible stomach troubles, really. He would hide at a hotel, in under his surname, the Pickwick Hotel in kansas. What he was there he started writing memos about what was going on, how he had to be corrupt and how it was hurting him. He wanted a record cap and these were kept secret, these pickwick papers, for many years. They were opened in time and used by people, but reduced in the sense of who was getting what pay off . What was going on . I am able to plot harrys promises and the times he had to give in to pendergast, which was not often, by the way, but he did develop the psychosomatic illnesses, which stayed with him for many years as he was in local politics for a long time, before he shot up to the senate. Pendergast had to get rid of him. He was too honest, he was not making enough money for him. Even though truman wanted to stay home and after he was a presiding county judge, which meant he controlled the flow of money for infrastructure, he wanted to be collector of taxes and the boss said no. He was too honest. You could not make him collector of taxes. We were at the Harry Truman Library 10 years ago i want to show you you must work with them, to see what they look like. I will ask you more about him. I do not think he had any expectation when he wrote these that anyone would ever want to read them. He just had to work out his thoughts and was really agonized by the position he was in. The last line on the last page, the camera would show it he says, am i an administrator or not . Or am i just a crook . To compromise in order to get the job done you judge it, i cannot. He was doing the best he could but it was a hard job. He tried to be honest in jackson county. How many of the pickwick papers did you read . All of them. Where did you do it . At home. Everything you can get on a cd rom a library that is wonderful to work with. I would tell him what to ask for, he did all of the grunt work. So i got all of this on cdrom and sometimes xeroxes. I did read them all. It is a wonderful statement he said that more than once. Am i an ethical fool . Everyone else was getting rich. There were two bonds in the county for 60 million. These are the 1920s 10 million a lot of money spent on infrastructure. And they said that you will never get it. He got it. He went around and said we needed. The second one, 50 million, harry truman built 162 miles of concrete roads. Before then, they were all dirt roads. He built to beautiful city halls. One was an art deco style. He built culverts. No farmer was more than a mile or so from one of these very big main roads. He built these spurs in concrete so the farmers could get across to the market. I think i mentioned that he wrote a little book about what he did. He did not put his name on it, but he wrote it. A beautiful little book. You can get it from sources. He spent the money very wisely. Every once in awhile, some slip away. He said in one of the pickwick papers that if he had been a crook he could have made 1. 5 million, but he never took a dime. He was always poor and he said, i will remain poor. He was poor. Did he ever own a house . Never owned a house. Always lived with his mother in law and her mother before. He did not own the house with bess until all the old folks were gone. In independence. Could you give us a brief sketch about his life . Where was he born . He was born in missouri, 1884. He lived he was the son of an improvident farmer and title trader who went bust and could never really support the family. His father ran farms. Harry had a rich uncle. His mother inherited a farm. So he became a farmer. He started out, could not go to college because his father went bust. He started out in banking. He was a very good teller and manager of money. They said, we now have these farms to run and we need to. He did not want to go back. He hated farming. But he did. He became one of the best farmers in the area. He learned how to rotate crops. He could do a straight furrow with the horses. He had a book in front of him. He read more books while the horses were doing best. He grew hay and oats and whatever farmers were growing. He says in one of the letters, i never made dime in farming. They were never successful, always pour, huge mortgages. He did that for 10 years. I think one of the reasons why he joined the army was to get away from the farm. It was the best excuse he could make. He could not just leave his father died in 1914. He had a mother and a sister and brother. But if he joined the army uri patriot, so that is what he did you are a patriot, so that is what he did. He got away from it and never went back to it. I had a whole chapter on what a brilliant farming career he had it came out of nowhere. Who would have guessed that this young man who says in his letters, i was a sissy, i had no chance to play with, i could not play football, i played with my sister and my two girl cousins, that he went into the army and it may a man out of him. I do a lot with that he came out of the army, he was so masculine, he was ready to conquer the world. Which is what he ultimately did. How long was he in the army . About 19 months. He got out in 1919. How much combat did he see . He saw a lot of combat. He was a battery artillery commander. The record shows he had commendations, the record shows he was excellent and probably the best in at that whole sector, a series of sectors. He kept the guns clean, protected the horses, took a rowdy bunch of what he called irishman, just quoting, and turns them into a firstrate battery. The man loved it. They did not respond to his discipline he threw them out. He said, you must follow me. The first time they met him, they saw this guy with glasses and thought, this could be a real pushover. They have lost four captains because it was such a rowdy bunch. He looked at them and said, i want you to know one thing i do not have to go get along with you. He said, you have to get along with me. Dismissed. Then the next morning, he looked at their records and busted four on the spot. Promoted a couple that showed promise. Brought in some new guys. And he started to polish up the team and make a very good team. It was noticed what a good leader he was he was sent off to school. Then he got to france he did not know algebra, he did not know trigonometry. He did not know how to use the guns. All that had to be learned in school. He was a good student. He said it was the toughest thing he ever had to do, to go to those artillery schools. The one in france was napoleons artillery school. A very elite group. He said he was surrounded by these guys from yale who looked down upon him as a highschool graduate. He showed them i am as good as they are, he said. When was he elected to the senate . 1934. How many terms . He was reelected in 1940, a second term, and was chosen Vice President in 1944. Why . Well, it was sas simple one sentence reason. That is, he would lose the least amount of votes as second place on the tickets of all the candidates who wanted to be Vice President. A host of others. They were at sixes and sevens. Roosevelt was playing his usual game of toying with his aides i like this guy, and they were not getting anywhere. Finally, ed flynn, the boss of new york, a powerful machine politician, went down to washington and said this has to be settled right now. They got to choose the man who will lose the fewest votes harry truman. Everyone said, he does not want it. He has been asked and said i do not want to be Vice President. He said, we do not care. Somebody call him. Someone did. Harry responded that unless the president called him he would not know it was really true. Roosevelt did not like him he thought he was still a pendergast crook. Truman was not his kind. There was not in eastern elite guy who went to harvard or yale or spoke with a broad accent. He was a midwest politician with a highschool education. But fdr got on the phone and said, i want you to run with me. He said, why then did you not say so from the beginning . He had barnyard language when he was very angry, and only with men in the room, never with women. If you had told me this from the beginning, i would have said yes. He agreed to run. Bess was not happy, but by the time he got to the convention she was pleased, and margaret was delighted. His daughter. Do you remember was fdr when he ran again, was he inaugurated in march or was it january back then . It was march. So fdr died he dies right away. Truman was Vice President for literally 82 days. Being truman, he actually presided over the senate. Nowadays the Vice President does not bother over that unless his vote is needed to break a tie. He was there every day, saying, that is my job. I am head of the senate. Some interesting stories about how he was in sam rayburns office he used to prepare for the next days business, and got a phone call from the white house, get to the phone right away. He picked up the phone and at the other and they said, get to the white house as soon as you can. So he grabbed his hat and dashed out, he had a car, they g