suit his own purposes or amusement in his ripe old age, is in itself interesting.

You have to have done your homework before you go into an interview. Most beginners rush into an interview all at once, not really prepared, and as a consequence don't know what to listen for. It is not just the questions you ask; it is listening to what is being said and knowing enough to know when somebody is trying to fog one by you or when there is a crucial point being made that someone who had not done their homework might miss entirely.

I have taught at Wesleyan University in the writers' program there and at Cornell. In working with students, I urged them to get out and talk to people, to make contact with that other time we call the past-which, of course, was not really the past at all; it was always the present, only it was someone else's present, not ours to make that contact, if only to remind themselves that what we are dealing with is life, living people who were inconsistent and who did not know how it was all going to come out.

I interviewed some 127 people for the Truman biography. Some of the interviews weren't worth much. Others were

invaluable. In several cases over the ten years I worked on the book, I went back many times to talk to the same people, who were not only on the scene but whose memories were clear and who could also, from the vantage point of the

present, see things in balance. A number of those people were not the kind whose names usually figure in history.

Some, for example, were Secret Service agents, and it was dismaying to me to find how many of them, Secret Service agents who were on the scene all the time with the President-and not just with Harry Truman but, in some cases, with Franklin Roosevelt-had never been interviewed before. What a waste! When they are gone, so much of what they know will be gone.

Consider, as an example, the attempted assassination of President Truman in the autumn of 1950, when he was living in Blair House. If one were to research that story, as I had to, one can go to newspaper accounts, magazine accounts, photographs published of the assailants, of the whole setting there on Pennsylvania Avenue. You can see that there were indeed streetcars on Pennsylvania Avenue then, and a streetcar island between Blair House and the old State Department building across the street. You can see where the President's bedroom window was, above the doorway into Blair House. You can see where the

guard booths were. All of that. And you can go over the court records of the trial of the one assailant who survived.

But for me, the most valuable experience of all was to go with two of the Secret Service agents from that time one of whom actually took part in the exchange of gunfire-and to have them walk me through the entire event, step by step, on a Saturday afternoon here in Washington, both inside Blair House and out on the street.

That experience, that courtesy, the generosity of those two men, Rex Scouten and Floyd Boring, to give over much of their Saturday, was of greatest value to me, not just in clarifying what happened but in getting a feeling of what it was like to have been there then-what the heat of the day felt like, for example. The White House police had changed into winter uniforms, and it was an intensely hot day, in the high eighties. They were all suffering in their winter uniforms as they stood watch outside the building.

I don't think we really know anything until we feel it. Most of what is in a biography or history we can look up in an encyclopedia or textbook or almanac. The effort on my part is to make you become part of that time, part of that experience, to know those people as you know people in your own lives-maybe even a little better and to bridge the divide between now and then. Working with people like Rex Scouten and Floyd Boring is exhilarating. It is one of the reasons you want to get up out of bed in the morning when you do this kind of work.

Then there are the long interviews with people who were, say, members of the President's family, like Margaret Truman Daniel; or members of the President's White House staff, like Clark Clifford, among others; or John Snyder, who was a member of the President's cabinet.

The man who I would have to say gave me more valuable help, greater insight, a balanced perspective from someone who was there at the time, is with us today in this audience: George Elsey. Mr. Elsey was a member of President Truman's

White House staff from day one, from the day that Franklin Roosevelt died. As a young naval officer, he had been assigned to the top secret Map Room in the White House during the Roosevelt administration. So he saw the change firsthand. He lived through, personally, that momentous transition from Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman, and he talked with me at length about all that, providing insights I never ever could have gained from just conventional research with manuscript collections. To compound his value to history, he has also given his papers to the Truman Library in Independence, so I had the benefit of a volume of memorandums and personal notes written at the time he was serving on the White House staff.

Great help came, too, from Lyman Field of Kansas City. As a young attorney, Lyman Field had campaigned across Missouri for Harry Truman in 1948 and, as fortune had it, he was the man who opened the door the morning that Truman arrived at the Muehlebach Hotel, at the Presidential Suite on the seventeenth floor, the morning they all knew that— my God!-Harry Truman had been reelected that he had won, defeated Thomas E. Dewey in the greatest political upset in our history. Lyman Field opened the door and thus was the first person to congratulate the President on his victory. Mr. Field described for me what I consider one of the most important scenes in the whole story. How did Truman react when he knew he had won? He had not only proven all the experts to be wrong but had vindicated his first term and triumphed in a way no politician ever had in the history of the country. So how did he react? What did he say? Was he astonished? Exuberant? What did he do?

What he did was to come into that room, where all of his people were absolutely out on their feet, exhausted from the long night, and sit down and act as if nothing at all out of the ordinary had. happened. Now remember, this was behind the scenes. He was with his own people, with whom he would not ever put on an act. He was not much good at

putting on an act of any kind at any time. It is six o'clock in the morning, and there he is with his own people. What his actions show is that he really did believe all along, from the beginning, that he was going to win. His confidence in victory had been no act. He was not surprised, because he knew that was how it was going to come out.

When Lyman Field recounted the scene, I thought, "Well, maybe that is the way it was, or maybe it is the way he would like to remember that it happened." Then quite soon after my interview with him, I found an old letter written by another man who had been in the same room, Jerome Walsh, also a Kansas City attorney. The letter had been written only days after the election, and it confirmed absolutely everything Lyman Field said, in great detail and with particular emphasis on the President's sense of who he was. He knew who he was, and he knew that the real concern at the moment was, "What do we do next? We have to go back to Washington, and we have to continue, and we have big problems to solve."

Manuscript collections . . . the use of the visual record in photography and film ... the interviews . . . and to that is added the coverage by the press at the time. There was wonderful, vivid reporting by people like Robert Donovan of the New York Herald Tribune, who has written an excellent two-volume study of the Truman administration, Marquis Childs of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Eddie Folyard of the Washington Post. And besides, there were the news magazines.

Here, again, I come to an extremely valuable, revealing source from which I greatly benefited, thanks to the Truman. Library.

As you may know, the practice at Time magazine in that day was to have its correspondents file from Washington virtually everything they knew to the editors. in New York, who would then process the material, rewrite it, condense it, and so forth. Under the system, correspondents would slug what was not to be used as "Not for attribution" and then

write whatever they knew, whatever they'd been told by people on the Hill or at the White House-all this for the benefit of the head office.

One of those Time correspondents, Frank McNaughton, gave his complete files to the Truman Library. So it is possible now to read a great deal that was not going into the magazine or into the papers. One example is a wonderful interview with Vice President Harry Truman filled with reams of material that never appeared in the magazine. Another vivid example is an account of a dinner party at the F Street Club, at which George Marshall, who normally never even accepted dinner invitations, gave a glowing toast to the President, one of the highest compliments, greatest tributes, ever paid to Harry Truman, which left not only the President nearly speechless but also left many in the room in tears.

Now let me say something very quickly about presidential libraries. There is a feeling among some scholars, as I am sure you're aware, that it would be better if all the presidential library collections were here in Washington, under the roof-figuratively, if not literally-of the National Archives. It would thus be more convenient for scholars to work here, to have access to other collections in Washington, and would make their work of

scholarship more efficient over all.

I disagree. I think it is extremely important that a writer working on a subject like President Harry Truman spend a lot of time in Independence, Missouri. I thank God I had to go to the Truman Library to do my work because it was not just by being in the library that I began to get a sense of the man but by being in the community, in that part of Missouri, in all seasons. I found how much we assume is true Trumanesque is in fact represented in the people of western Missouri in general: expressions, manners, the whole approach to life that one still finds in Independence. To me this is essential in understanding Truman, and I've no doubt the same applies at Hyde Park, New York, or Abilene, Kansas.

It's interesting, too, the extent to which the libraries themselves, the personalities of the libraries themselves, are an expression of the personalities of the Presidents for which they were established. The Truman Library is very different from the library at Hyde Park, as both are very different from, say, the Eisenhower Library or the LBJ Library at Austin. The Truman Library is rather informal, very friendly, unpretentious. There is no great rigmarole about official procedure. People there not only live in Independence, many of them grew up in Independence,

many knew Mr. Truman in the days when he was the most important item on exhibit at the Truman Library.

Now the writing, the capture after the chase. I am a narrative historian. It has been said lately that narrative history is coming back into fashion. I have never written history any other way. I have always been a narrative historian, and I have always felt that I was working in a tradition, in a school of people who were not trained as historians, many of whom began as journalists or were in English majors in college, as I was, and who see the writing of history as a way of selfexpression, who report from the past as a correspondent might report from another part of the world. I see writers like Paul Horgan, Wallace Stegner, Shelby Foote, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Caro, Robert Massey, and Jean Strouse as all working in the same tradition.

In writing about the past and in writing narrative history, it is essential continuously to create the effect that what is happening is not on a track. Events did not have to go the way they went. At any point, anywhere along the line, for any number of reasons, things could have taken a different direction. As soon as you use the past tense, as soon as you begin using words like "was," it seems to fix things as having been always fixed. And this presents a writing problem. The reader knows that Harry Truman is going to become President of the United States. The reader knows that the Brooklyn Bridge stands, it was built, you can drive across it this afternoon if you wish. But how to create the effect where the reader wonders, "What is going to happen to this fellow, Truman? What will he make of his life?" Is he going to turn out, in Dickens's phrase, as the hero of his own story? Is the Brooklyn Bridge ever going to be built? It looks impossible. How can such difficulties ever be surmounted?

Among the ways you do this is to avoid arrogance in your judgments because you, the writer, have the huge advantage of hindsight. You try to be clear. You try to be anything but verbose. That may sound a bit odd coming from someone

who has just written 992 pages, but you should have seen how long it almost was. Above all, you have to decide the form of the book. In my experience, once the form is clear, the rest actually falls into place rather smoothly.

What do I mean by "form"? My previous book, a biography of a kind, was of Theodore Roosevelt. Once I saw the form, that I would begin when he was about eight or nine years old and would end when he was about twenty-eight, then the whole idea would be to focus on the kind of metamorphosis that takes place with that frightened, peculiar little boy who turns into the man we know as Teddy Roosevelt. How did that happen? What were the influences? What was going on in his life? What was going on in his family? What was happening within his mind and his emotions? It would not be a biography in the conventional way. Instead of taking the full, crowded life and trying to make it manageable, I would concentrate on only a portion. It would be as if I were to say to you, "Come over and look into this microscope. I want to show you something." So there is the form.

With Truman, by contrast, I knew that I wanted to do the complete life. I wanted to cover the full sweep from birth to death, nearly ninety years of one man's

odyssey and of the history of our time, of the country and of the world. Where to begin?-because that has a great deal to do with form. And where to end?

It has been fashionable for some time now to begin biographies almost anywhere but the beginning. It would have been quite easy, and I am sure I would have had no resistance from my editor had I begun, say, with some riveting, telling incident in Truman's life as President, then flashed back and started over from the beginning. Or the book might have opened with the elderly President setting off in Independence on one of his early morning walks, moving along not only through the town but symbolically through his own boyhood past there. Or I could have begun with Franklin Roosevelt and his vice presidential nominee,

Harry Truman, posing for a famous picture as they ate lunch under the Jackson magnolia at the White House, a fleeting, vivid moment to show the contrast between these two very different menwhich is in fact a scene that comes midway through the book.

But it seemed to me that the form in this case, as in other cases, ought to be in harmony with the subject. A tricky beginning or a fashionable device of not starting at the beginning would be out of character because there was nothing fashionable or tricky about Harry Truman. He was also, at heart, a nineteenth-century man. He was born, grew up, his outlook, habits of speech and thought, his feelings about the use of telephones and air conditioning and daylight saving time and all the rest were all formed in that very dif

ferent time prior to World War I. His lifelong heroes were nineteenth-century men: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Andrew Jackson. His favorite authors were nineteenth-century authors. So it seemed to me that my biography ought to have an essentially nineteenthcentury form, that it should be big, like David Copperfield, and definitely it ought to begin at the beginning and move steadily forward. Maybe it should even begin before the beginning, because there is a resonance in our lives before we are born as well as after we die. So that is what I did. The whole momentum of the book is a straight line, direct narrative, no flashbacking.

When you are writing about a period that is within living memory of a great many of your readers, people who know

Like his heroes Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, Truman, ca. 1910, was essentially a nineteenth-century man.

who George Marshall was or who remember the 1948 campaign, that is all well and good. But you have also to keep constantly in mind that there will be a very large part of your reading audience for whom all of this is as old and unknown as the days of Caesar. We have, alas, a large part of the book-reading population that is historically illiterate. So you have to introduce George Marshall, you have to tell the reader who he was and convey some sense of the aura of the man while, at the same time, not insulting or boring those readers who know perfectly well who George Marshall was. This is not easy, believe me, and it is essentially a writing problem.

All in all, what begins to happen is that the chase and the capture become nearly one and the same. So by writing, you're discovering what you don't know and what you need to know. By researching, you are learning what more needs to be said. If you are writing over an extended period of time, as I was, you have to deal with another problem: you yourself are changing, not to say the world around you, and things begin to look a little different.

In the last part of the ten years I spent on my book, the cold war ended. Here I was, telling the story of the man who was President at the start of the cold war. How does he, how does his presidency look now that we have the advantage of knowing how it all came out? It does affect how you judge the material you're working with. It does affect how you judge the character and outlook of your protagonist.

Most telling for me was the moment when, in reading Truman's farewell address, I came to a passage that four or five years ago would have made no pronounced impression. He is describing how he thinks the cold war will end. Read now, knowing what we know now, it leaps off the page.

He says, in effect: I do not know when it will end, but if we maintain our strength and our freedom and are prudent, the Soviet empire will eventually break apart and fail of its own accord. I don't know if it's going to happen first in Moscow or in the satellite nations, but happen it will. We just have to be faithful to ourselves. We have to keep the faith.

Of course, what he is saying is that faith is what has propelled him in office and what ought to propel all of us as Ameri

cans.

I was extremely privileged to be able to keep company with Harry Truman for ten years, to work with the Truman papers at the Truman Library. The collection of Truman letters number in the many thousands. They and his diary entries offer a chance to get below the surface in a way rarely possible with a public figure. Franklin Roosevelt never poured himself out on paper, never revealed what he was feeling, his private anger and aspirations, what he loved, what he feared. Truman does all that and then

some.

In one month in 1947, when things were going rather hard for him and Mrs. Truman, Bess Wallace Truman, was back in Independence with her mother, he wrote to her twenty-two times, and they are letters of substance. He was a man of substance. He was not just plain "Give 'em Hell, Harry." He was not James Whitmore portraying Truman. As George Elsey, Clark Clifford, David Stowe, and a