This is the astonishing story of Bess W. Truman and her love for her husband, Harry, as only their daughter could tell it. Bess W. Truman is more than a rare, intimate, and surprising portrait of a famous First Lady, it is also the heartwarming story of an enduing love and a remarkable political partnership. Margaret Truman has been able to draw on her own personal reminiscences and a treasure trove of 1,000 letters from Bess and several hundred from Harry, never before published.
For the first time, Margaret Truman reveals the strong role her mother played in harry Truman's important political decisions -- during his ascent to the Senate, the Vice-Presidency, and to the White House itself. And we see history from the inside out as the lives of Harry and Bess evoke the great events of the Truman era: dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the stunning upset of Thomas Dewey, the firing of Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War, the vicious McCarthy hearings, and more. Bess W. Truman recreates the human drama of an extraordinary woman and a man who became a beloved American president.
Margaret Truman was born in Independence, Missouri, the daughter of then-future President and Mrs. Harry S. Truman. She was raised in Independence until 1934 when her father was elected to the U.S. Senate, and she began to split her time between Independence and Washington, D.C. She graduated from private school in 1942, and earned her Associate of Arts degree from George Washington University in 1944, the year her father was elected Vice President. She received her B.A. in History from from George Washington University in 1946. Having been taking voice lessons for seven years, she made her concert debut in 1947, singing over a nationwide radio hookup with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. She began a series of concert tours that would go on for about six years. She made her first television appearance in 1950 on Ed Sullivan's "Toast of the Town" show. In January 1953 when her father left the White House, she moved to New York City to work more closely with the National Broadcasting Company. She began writing in addition to her broadcasting career, and her first book, Souvenir, Margaret Truman's Own Story, was published in 1956, the same year she married New York Times assistant-editor Clifton Daniel. In February 1965, she became co-host of a daily television program broadcast from Philadelphia. In 1966, she began a daily radio interview program called "Authors in the News." In 1973, she moved with her family to Washington D.C. when her husband became chief of the New York Times Washington bureau. In 1977, her husband retred and they moved back to New York City.
Over the course of her writing career, she wrote nine works of non-fiction and 24 murder-mysteries, although some people believe that the mysteries may have been ghost-written by a different author.
