Obituaries

The president’s daughter who became a popular author

Margaret Truman Daniel

1924–2008

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, the lives of Vice President Harry Truman and his family changed forever. Truman’s wife, Bess, maintained an intense privacy. By contrast, his college-age daughter, Margaret, who died last week at 83, used her newfound fame to launch a career first as a concert singer and then as an author.

Margaret Truman was a history major at George Washington University when her father became president, said the Los Angeles Times. Her “lessons in the perils of unwanted political celebrity were instant.” Early on, when she innocently told a restaurant waiter, “No potatoes, please,” and said she drank tomato juice while dieting, “she set off something of a public relations war” between the potato and tomato lobbies. When Truman was photographed wearing a scarf instead of a hat, Women’s Wear Daily editorialized that she had damaged the women’s hat industry.

After graduating, Truman became a singer, said The Washington Post, debuting with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 1947. Although audiences liked her, many reviewers didn’t. On Dec. 6, 1950, the Post’s music critic Paul Hume wrote that “Miss Truman cannot sing very well. She is flat a good deal of the time.” An irate President Truman famously complained to Hume that he had written a “lousy review” and said that if they ever met, “you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!” Although the president’s advisors had urged him not to send the letter, White House mail ran 80 percent in his favor. “I’m glad to see that chivalry is not dead,” said Margaret.

She curtailed her singing after marrying Clifton Daniel, the future managing editor of The New York Times, in 1956, said the Times. That same year, she published her first book, Souvenir: Margaret Truman’s Own Story. Altogether she wrote more than 30 volumes, “including biographies of both her parents and 23 mystery novels in her popular ‘Capital Crime Series,’ all set in and around Washington.” Her most famous was Murder in the White House (1980), which earned her more than $200,000 for the paperback rights alone. Her son Clifton, who survives her along with two other sons, once explained her penchant for the whodunit genre: “My mother seems to have a strong opinion, often bad, of almost everyone in Washington. That’s why she writes those murder mysteries: so she can kill them all off, one at a time.”

The RAF flier who was part of the Great Escape

Bertram ‘Jimmy’ James

1915–2008

Royal Air Force Squadron Leader Bertram James was shot down by the Luftwaffe in June 1940 and spent the rest of World War II in prisoner of war camps. During that time, he took part in 13 daring prison-camp breakouts, including the most famous of all, depicted in the Hollywood epic The Great Escape.

A tea planter’s son, James began trying to get home almost as soon as he was deposited in Stalag Luft I on the Baltic Sea, said the London Telegraph. Once, when the camp lights blacked out, he tried to walk through the main gate in a disguise. “On another occasion he started a tunnel while still in solitary confinement.” This persistence got James consigned in 1943 to the supposedly escape-proof Stalag Luft III, in Germany. There, he immediately joined an elaborate plot to escape. James “was put in charge of dispersing the sand excavated from the tunnel ‘Harry,’” which ran 365 feet under the camp.

On the freezing night of March 24, 1944, James was selected as the 39th man out of 200 who hoped to break out from “Harry,” said the London Independent. Problems arose almost immediately. “There was ice on the trapdoor which took half an hour to dislodge. The exit hole emerged 30 feet short of the woods.” But James, disguised as a foreign worker, did get out and headed for Czechoslovakia, only to be captured 14 days later and confined to the Sachsenhausen death camp. Upon arrival he remarked, “The only way out of here is up the chimney.” But he was lucky. Of the 76 men who escaped from Stalag Luft III, three got back to England, but 50 were murdered by the Gestapo.

James escaped briefly from Sachsenhausen, only to be recaptured, and was being marched with other prisoners to Dachau when he was liberated by the U.S. Army on May 3, 1945. After the war he joined the British diplomatic corps. Though awarded the Military Cross for gallantry, he remained humble. “I was just a guy who wanted to get home,” he said. “I was no hero.”

The agriculture secretary who resigned over a racist joke

Earl Butz

1909-2008

In 1972, Richard Nixon told Earl Butz that as secretary of agriculture, he should be a vigorous departmental spokesman. “Mr. President,” Butz responded, “you may have a more vigorous spokesman than you want.” He was proved right when, four years later, Butz’s inability to control his mouth forced him from office.

Raised on a 160-acre farm in Indiana, Butz received a doctorate from Purdue University and served as dean of its agriculture school, said Bloomberg News. An assistant secretary of agriculture under Dwight Eisenhower, he emerged as a leading free-market advocate and opponent of federal subsidies, often getting his points across with plain talk. “He exhorted farmers to ‘plant fence row to fence row’ to meet global demand, helping to drive down surging food costs.”

His tart tongue proved his undoing, said The New York Times. “Trouble first arrived in November 1974 when Butz, using a mock Italian accent, criticized Pope Paul VI’s opposition to using artificial birth control as a solution to world food problems.” Then, in 1976, he “made a remark in which he described blacks as ‘coloreds’ who wanted only three things—satisfying sex, loose shoes, and a warm bathroom—desires that he listed in obscene and scatological terms.” By then, Gerald Ford had become president, and after Ford formally reprimanded Butz, he resigned. “The use of a bad racial commentary in no way reflects my real attitude,” he said.

After leaving office, Butz was a sought-after lecturer, but ran afoul of the IRS by understating his 1978 income by nearly $150,000; he served 25 days in jail. At the time of his death, he was the nation’s oldest ex-Cabinet secretary.