Truman descendant's Waterloo visit evokes memories, emotions
Clifton Truman Daniel, President Harry Truman's grandson, gives talks, performs play about grandfather around the country.
WATERLOO -- Clifton Truman Daniel is now about the same age as his grandfather was when he was leader of the free world 75 years ago.
He's not only been told he's started looking like his grandfather — President Harry S. Truman — he was told he should start playing his grandfather on stage.
A journalist by trade who dabbled in local theater, he was encouraged to try playing the part.
He did -- and has been portraying his grandfather regularly since 2017, in places like Wichita, Kan.; Galveston, Texas; Jefferson City, Mo. and Key West, Fla.
He's also written two books on his grandparents and gives lectures on his grandfather's administration and memories of his life as a presidential grandchild. He gave such a talk last week in Waterloo at the Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum, part of the Grout Museum District. The talk was warmly received. Many longtime residents told stories of seeing or actually meeting his grandfather as youths during one of his “whistle stop” election campaigns.
Daniel's also honorary chairman of the foundation for the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Mo. and does events at the Truman Little White House in Key West Fla., where his grandfather vacationed during his administration.
Daniel, who grew up in Manhattan in New York City and has lived in Chicago for 25 years, will turn 66 in June. His grandfather was 61 when he took office on April 12, 1945 and 68 when he left it on Jan. 20, 1953.
Daniel was asked if he ever thought he'd be playing his grandfather on stage at his grandfather's age.
"No!" Daniel said. "Are you kidding? It has to be the weirdest retirement program anybody ever came up with! I never thought I'd be playing my grandfather."
He took up the role after taking early retirement as director of public relations at Truman College, in Chicago, a 5,200-student institution offering two-year degrees and the largest of the City Colleges of Chicago. Prior to that, he worked as a feature writer and editor for the Morning Star and Sunday Star-News a New York Times-owned paper] in Wilmington, N.C..
While in Wilmington he became involved in the Opera House Theatre Company, a nonprofit professional theater company founded in 1983 by Broadway actor Chris Chriscuolo. It was there he first played his grandfather on stage after encouragement from friends. One told him bluntly, "Find a script and start learning it." And Criscuolo booked the dates.
it is rare, if not unprecedented that any president would be portrayed onstage by a family descendant.
The one-act play, "Give 'Em Hell, Harry!, " written by Samuel Gallu, has been around since 1975. Various actors have played Truman in it, including most famously James Whitmore, as well as Kevin McCarthy (the actor, not the current U.S. House speaker) and even Fred Grandy, the former Iowa U.S. congressman and "Love Boat" television series co-star.
Daniel says he avoids watching other performers, because he doesn't want to fall into the trap of, for example, “mimicking Fred Grandy mimicking my grandfather.”
Even though the play is nearly 50 years old, "I was astonished how much of it echoes -- not just echoes -- but is dead-on for today," Daniel said.
The play was conceived following a wave of renewed popularity for Truman after the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon's administration in the early 1970s. That popularity was a contrast from the record-low 22 percent approval rating Truman scored in the Gallup Poll in February 1952. A month later, Truman lost New Hampshire Democratic primary to Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and decided not to seek re-election.
Truman’s popularity skyrocketed following his Dec. 26, 1972 passing at age 88, as Watergate still roiled following Nixon’s re-election. Reflections on Truman’s administration and biographies — including a very successful one by Daniel’s mother, Margaret Truman Daniel — made the recently departed 33rd president a hero in popular culture. The rock band Chicago even recorded a hit song “Harry Truman,” also released in 1975, written by founding band member Robert Lamm, that reached No. 13 on the Billboard magazine’s “Hot 100” most popular songs in the country.
In the 2021 Presidential Historians Survey conducted by C-SPAN, historians ranked Truman as the sixth greatest president of all time, behind Lincoln, Washington, both Roosevelts and Eisenhower. Truman’s ranked fifth or sixth in the four C-SPAN surveys done over the past 20 years.
Just as Truman's standards and aspirations to integrity stood in contrast to the times of the early '70s, many of Daniel’s audiences find it bears similar contrast to more recent office holders.
Depending on the audience, Daniel said he gets ripples of "oohs” at certain lines which strike close to home to recent events. Other lines elicit outright laughter and applause. At a recent performance in Wichita, Daniel said he had to pause at parts in the play he never has before for laughter and applause.
Daniel also has participated in programs at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch with journalist Margaret Hoover, the great-great granddaughter of Iowa-born President Herbert Hoover and Waterloo-born First Lady Lou Henry Hoover.
Daniel’s parents achieved success in their own rite. His mother, in addition to the bestselling biography on her father, was an accomplished mystery writer, writing, among other works, “Murder in the White House.”
Daniel’s father, Elbert Clifton Daniel, Jr., a native North Carolinian, was a career journalist for The New York Times. He served as the paper’s managing editor from 1964 to 1969 and was The Times’ Washington bureau chief in the early ‘70s – ironically, during Watergate. He also was the only Western newspaper correspondent in the Soviet Union during his time in Moscow in 1954-55.
His parents’ cremains are interred near his grandparents graves on the Truman Library grounds in Independence.
Clifton Truman Daniel also has participated in programs in Japan with survivors of atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ordered by his grandfather, which brought an end to World War II.
One World War II veteran attending Daniel’s Waterloo talk, retired U.S. Army Reserve Maj. Gen. Evan “Curly” Hultman, credits Truman for saving his and countless others’ lives on both sides by dropping the bombs, ending the war and avoiding an even bloodier, protracted invasion of Japan. It wasn’t an easy decision, Daniel said, and the point of the programs with survivors of those bombs is to resolve that such a war, and the use of such weapons, “never happens again."
Another Waterloo World War II veteran attending Daniel’s talk, David Greene, a Marine who served at Iwo Jima, and his late wife hosted Japanese foreign exchange students and was even able to return flag of a deceased foe, covered with writings from loved ones, back to his surviving family.
Daniel’s heard many stories and experiences like that from those who attend his talks and see him portray his grandfather. It’s all almost as accidental as his grandfather’s presidency, which resulted from the death of President Franklin Roosevelt.
“As far as playing my own grandfather on stage, it never occurred to me to do the play,” he said. “People started saying I look like my grandfather. I was already lecturing about it. My friends thought that was a great idea and pushed me to doing something about it.
“You spend months trying to learn it, get the accents and the mannerisms,” he said. “And then you have time to think about it.
“It still resonates today. It wasn’t until people walked up to me after a show and said, ‘Oh my God. When was this written?’ that I began to realize what I was doing.
“I do it because it came to me. I enjoy it, and what I hope people get out of it is, one, you get some sense of what a president of the United States should be.
“And you do get the sense that we do the same things over and over again,” he added. “The politics of 1975 is very much the same today, with different players and different degrees of seriousness and danger.”
The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative
I love the links between the past and the present!
Great all-encompassing article, Pat! You've uncovered so many little-known facts, my friend! How could I have been unaware of the Chicago song?! Wow. Too cool. Sorry to have missed this event.