Excerpt from Harry S. Truman by Margaret Truman Daniel

Just in time, Dad discovered that the White House was literally falling down. For more than a year he had been prodding the Commission of Grounds and Buildings to take a good look at the place. He had begun to worry about it one night in 1947 at an official reception, when the guard of honor came in to take the colors away. As the husky young color bearers stamped across the floor in precise military unison, Dad looked up and saw the big chandelier above his head - and the heads of all his guests - swaying. A few weeks later, when the butler brought him breakfast in his study, he felt the whole floor sway, as if it was floating in space. Several weeks after he reported these alarming observations to the commission, he learned his fears were well founded.

The time and place in which he learned it makes an almost incredible story. The news arrived in the middle of the last official reception of the '46-'47 winter. Dad was listening to Eugene List, the young pianist he had discovered at Potsdam, play for "the customers," as he called the guests in a letter to his mother.

"I was somewhat nervous through the entertainment because Mr. Crim an usher, and Jim Rowley came and told me that the engineers had found that the chain holding the center chandelier was stretching. Well, the survey had been made three or four weeks ago and it was a nice time to tell me. I let the show go on and ordered the thing down the next day. If it had fallen, I'd been in a real fix. But it didn't."

Early in 1948 Dad told his sister what the engineers had finally concluded.

"I've had the second floor where we live examined - and it is about to fall down! The engineer said that the ceiling in the state dining room only stayed up from force of habit! I'm having it shored up and hoping to have a concrete and steel floor put in before I leave here. The roof fell in on Coolidge and they put a concrete and steel third floor on to take its place and suggested that the second floor be done the same way. But Old Cal wouldn't do it. He wanted it to fall like the roof did I guess."

The shoring up was quite an operation. For months we had to live with a forest of pipes running up through our private rooms. They were particularly thick in Dad's study, my sitting room, and Mother's bedroom. You had to walk around them to get out the doors. It was not what I called gracious living. Meanwhile, Dad appointed a committee of experts to examine the entire house from roof to foundations and tell him what needed to be done. Their report made hair-raising reading. The foundation was sinking into the swampy ground beneath it. There was no visible support for the ceiling in the Green Room but a few very rusty nails.

In the summer of 1948 the old house just started to fall apart. One of the two pianos in my sitting room - a spinet - broke through the floor one day. My sitting room, I should add, was just above the family dining room. Dad jotted on his diary-calendar: "How very lucky we are that the thing did not break when Margie and Annette Wright were playing two-piano duets." A few days later he told his sister:

"The White House is still about to fall in. Margaret's sitting room floor broke in two but didn't fall through the family dining room ceiling. They propped it up and fixed it. Now my bathroom is about to fall into the red parlor. They won't let me sleep in my bedroom or use the bath. I'm using Old Abe's bed and it is very comfortable."

On November 7, 1948, when we returned from Missouri, the White House engineer and architect refused to let us into the place. Dad told his sister that he:

"found the White House in one terrible shape. There are scaffolds in the East Room, props in the study, my bedroom, Bess's sitting room and the Rose Room . . . We've had to call off all functions and will move out as soon as I come back from Key West."

At that time he thought it would "take at least ten months to tear the old second floor out and put it back." By the time we came back from Key West, the experts had taken a harder look at the situation, and decided that there was nothing that could be saved but the outside walls. The entire house would have to be gutted and rebuilt.

This meant that we had to move across the street to Blair House. There were no complaints on my part, except the usual moans during the packing and unpacking days. As I've explained earlier, I much preferred Blair House to the White House. But Blair House created serious entertainment problems for Dad and Mother. As he told his sister, Mary, "It is a nice place but only half as large - so we have no place to put guests." This applied not only to overnight guests but the standard official visitors at White House receptions. Instead of being able to entertain 1,200 or 1,500 at a single reception, everything had to be scaled down to half size and this meant that poor Mother was in perpetual motion as a hostess. But Mother, good soldier that she is, "met the situation" Truman-Wallace style. There was, Dad pointed out in a letter he wrote toward the end of 1948, one consolation:

"It's a shame the old White House had to fall down. But it's a godsend it didn't when we had 1,500 people in it."

From Harry S. Truman by Margaret Truman Daniel.
Copyright 1972 by Margaret Daniel.
Courtesy of William Morrow & Co.

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