My Days With Harry Truman

In 1970, Margaret Truman and bestselling author Thomas Fleming spent eight days with her father, President Harry Truman, as part of their research for a biography of the thirty-third president of the United States. Truman had personally chosen Fleming as Margaret's collaborator. He had read and admired Fleming's biography of Thomas Jefferson. In this essay, Fleming recounts that amazing time, during which the elder statesman sets the record straight on Douglas MacArthur, Charles de Gaulle, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, Joseph Stalin, the atomic bomb, and, most important, the American presidency.