Presidential family members I have met

Part 2: My second author: the President’s daughter—Margaret Truman Daniel

I was born during Harry Truman’s second term as U.S. President, just seven months after “Give ‘Em Hell Harry” defeated the odds-on favorite, Tom Dewey, in a come-from-behind four-way race. A real thriller! Even before I became a newspaper reporter in the 1970s, just before he died, I used to delight at the photograph of him displaying the most famous wrong headline of the 20th century: “Dewey Defeats Truman!”

I never did get the chance to meet him, although he was so familiar to me while growing up—even during the succeeding presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon—that I felt as if I knew him well. He was always larger than life, somehow, and just around the corner. You either loved him or hated him—there was no middle ground—and my Daddy loved him. Peppery, fearless, funny, even publicly threatening to punch a music critic in the nose for writing a bad review of his daughter Margaret’s singing career. Simply one of a kind.

The Truman family while Harry was in the White House. Public domain photo

Margaret Truman, born in 1924, was just about my mother’s age. As I left college and became a small-time newspaper reporter, I also became a fan of her writings—her critically-acclaimed biographies of her Dad (1972) and later, of her mother, First Lady Bess Truman. Margaret had by then married a rising New York Times journalist, Clifton Daniel—also a North Carolina native—and raised four sons. (My little sister Beth went to school with Cliff at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Margaret Truman, by now an established author, in 1977. Photo courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum

I gradually disengaged myself from active journalism to run my family’s retail business in Fayetteville, but the lure of that early life finally proved too strong to ignore. In 1981, I went back to Chapel Hill as a graduate student, enrolling in the doctoral program at the J-School (School of Journalism and Media), where I had once taken my initial undergraduate courses in news writing while majoring in English literature.

I was teaching news writing by now—to unwary sophomores and juniors—and like most Ph.D. students, often tapped by my Dean, Richard Cole, to perform certain helpful non-student tasks. Like escorting dignitaries invited to the annual induction ceremony into the N.C. Journalism Hall of Fame, established in 1981. In my second year, Richard persuaded me to get involved when local-boy-done-good, the legendary Clifton Daniel of the New York Times, was named in 1982.

Not that it was all that difficult—I would have done almost anything Richard asked, without a second thought—but my task was not exactly what I might have expected. It was not related to the banquet, at which glittering media personalities made long speeches and reminisced about their early days in North Carolina. It turned out that Daniel’s wife needed a chauffeur to visit Zebulon, where Clifton had grown up. Who better than another small-town Eastern North Carolina native?

The Clifton Daniel family, pictured in New York in the 1960s. Courtesy Truman Library

It was something of a kick, one I was actually thrilled to do. She was already one of my favorite authors—her Capital Crimes mystery series had recently debuted with Murder in the White House (1980)—and this seemed like anything but a chore. (I only wished I had a nicer car.) Back then, Zebulon was just a village with 2,000 residents—today, a thriving Wake County mini-metropolis about to vault past my native Dunn, stuck in a time warp at 9,000—or just a bit smaller than Independence, Missouri, with 11,000 souls when she was born.

Clifton Daniel’s obituary 18 years later in the New York Times described it this way: “Mr. Daniel's long, adventuresome and many-sided professional life was once summed up in a magazine profile with the headline, ‘Up From Zebulon.‘ Zebulon was the tiny lumber mill town in northeastern North Carolina where he was born and reared and where his parents saved the income from the family drugstore to put him through college in the Depression.”

I don’t think she had been there recently—the Daniels had spent most of their life in cosmopolitan Manhattan, and he had sold the home after his parents’ deaths. Still, her parents had stayed there twice in the late 1950s, and she simply wanted to see it again, perhaps for the last time. So on that fine spring day in 1982, the starstruck author and his famous guide struck out in my 1977 Toyota Corolla for the roughly hourlong trip east, 55 miles or so, from Chapel Hill. This was in the last days before the east-west Interstate 40 link was finally completed around Raleigh, so it did involve a “scenic” segment or two along NC Highway 54, then the winding but preferred two-lane route to Raleigh and beyond.

Downtown Zebulon, NC, now gentrified, as it looked in 2019. Public domain photo

The roomy old two-story homestead (ca. 1918) on Sycamore Street, where Clifton Daniel grew up, had passed out of family hands by then. It very much resembled my grandmother’s 1920-ish home in Dunn, and was “an intact and excellent example of a ‘Craftsman Foursquare’ so popular in Wake County during this time, according to the Wake County landmark report,” a profile on www.preservationzebulon.org read.

“After E. Clifton Daniel’s father’s death in 1968 and his mother Elva’s death in 1971, E. Clifton sold the house he had inherited and all of its furnishings to Jamaria and Theo Ward. They were diplomats who lived in Saudi Arabia and Japan and their furniture, collected from their travels, mixed with the traditional American furniture of the Daniels. A back porch was enclosed as a sunroom in 1971, to add room to the house, and the kitchen was modernized and enlarged by removing a wall between it and the pantry.”

The Sycamore Street childhood home of E. Clifton Daniel (2019) in Zebulon. Photo courtesy Preservation Zebulon.org

The town, founded in 1907, was named in honor of another N.C. legend—former governor and U.S. Senator Zebulon B. Vance of Statesville (1830-1894); tiny Vance County, formed on the Virginia border in 1881, was also named for him. [A Hebrew word, Zebulon means “dwelling of honor,” and is the name of one of one of the lost tribes of Israel.] We did not stop for a soft drink in Lizard Lick—the quaint crossroads three miles west of town, popularized by a quirky radio deejay, Pat Patterson, in Raleigh in the 1960s—but we did see a lot of rural countryside. (Back then, North Carolina was still the second most rural state in the country, after New Hampshire.)

On the ride to and from Zebulon, I got to know a little more about Margaret Truman Daniel, the person, not the celebrity. At first, she was quiet, reticent, but gradually, personable enough—probably still weary from the long trip down from New York—and it turns out, we were both history buffs. She had majored in history back at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in the 1940s.

I later learned that in addition to her concert career as a singer, she had been both a radio and TV personality in the 1950s, before marrying her husband, with an NBC contract after 1951. “On May 27, 1955, substituting for Edward R. Murrow on his television show ‘Person to Person,’ she interviewed her parents,” and later hosted a radio program (“Weekday”) before serving as “co-host on a half-hour special events program broadcast live from Philadelphia.” [See the full sketch at https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/education/trivia/margaret-truman-daniel ].

She was gracious enough to autograph my copy of her biography of her father, thanking me in her inscription for being her driver. [Alas, I did not yet own the Danish-language version of Murder in the White House (Mord i Det Hvide Hus), which I acquired years later, and was still inordinately popular overseas during my Foreign Service career.]

I was eventually a little disappointed to learn, after her death in 2008, that she had not actually written the subsequent two dozen or so Capital Crimes mysteries, but had technically, sold her naming rights, and hired a contract ghostwriter—even though she served as an active consultant, with her name on the covers. The books were still fun to read, and I bought most of them, the early ones, anyway.

Covers of two of Margaret Truman’s best-sellers. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Fiction was just a momentary sideline for her—and as I discovered later, a not-insignificant revenue stream. Her main interest lay in researching and writing nonfiction books, ranging from White House Pets (1969) to First Ladies: An Intimate Group Portrait of White House Wives (1995), and Bess W. Truman, her mother’s biography (1986). She was versatile, intelligent, and unforgettable—interesting, occasionally talkative, and certainly worth getting to know better.

She was certainly well worth the brief time I spent with her. I never saw her again before her death at age 83. (I probably should have interviewed her for the J-school newsletter, but could not figure out how to take notes while driving!) If you still want to learn even more about her, you can always watch her engaging 1998 interview on C-Span ( https://www.c-span.org/person/?56196/MargaretTrumanDaniel ).

Next time: From the sublime to the ridiculous: a former South American dictator disappears