Margaret Truman Daniel, who was the only child of President Truman and his wife, Bess, and who forged successive careers as a concert singer, an actress, a high-profile wife and mother, and a prolific biographer and mystery novelist, died Tuesday. She was 83.
Daniel, the widow of former New York Times managing editor Clifton Daniel, died in Chicago after a brief illness, according to the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Mo. A longtime resident of New York City, she recently moved to an assisted living facility in Chicago, where her eldest son, Clifton Truman Daniel, lives. A cause of death was not released.
Arguably the first first daughter to be subjected to the intrusive scrutiny of the burgeoning modern communications media, Daniel was a student at George Washington University when her father ascended to the presidency upon the death in 1945 of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lessons in the perils of unwanted political celebrity were instant.
She set off something of a public relations food fight when she quietly instructed a waiter, "No potatoes, please," and later said she drank tomato juice while dieting. The Potato Growers Assn. quickly lodged an official complaint and peppered the White House with protest letters. The Tomato Growers Assn. countered with an onslaught of supportive letters. The groups waged a marketing war in the national media, touting the nutritional value of their products.
When Daniel was photographed wearing a scarf, Women's Wear Daily editorialized that she had damaged the millinery industry -- a dispute quieted only after she wore a hat to another publicized event. Her hatted photo, in turn, set off protests from hairdressers.
Suddenly aware that what she said, what she did and how she looked would make her the most spotlighted White House offspring in history, she muted her comments and made sure her appearance in public was politically correct. As a young, single woman, she largely postponed dating to avoid false reports of pending engagements.
For seven years, she said later, her goal was to behave so that she wouldn't "wind up with a bad headline." In the process, she developed a longtime disdain for Washington and privately came to refer to the White House as "the great white jail."
What Mary Margaret Truman, the girl born and bred in Independence, Mo., would not mute, mollify or abandon was her quest -- somewhat unusual for a well-to-do young woman of the mid-20th century -- for a career.
