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Half a dozen graduates of Washington's now defunct Gunston Hall school for girls got together last week to celebrate the 27th birthday of their friend and classmate Margaret Truman. The night before, Margaret had come down from Manhattan to Washington for the occasion. A late riser by preference, she roused herself for an "early" (8:40) breakfast with her father at Blair House, lunched with her mother before going off to Best Friend Jane Lingo's house to gossip, giggle and eat her favorite chocolate cake with her old school chums.
"Marg" has a lot to tell her girl friends these days. She has come a long way since she first arrived at Gunston Hall 17 years ago as the obscure daughter of a freshman Senator from Missouri. In those days Margaret's classmates sometimes twitted her about the "silent Senator" who never opened his mouth on Capitol Hill. Margaret herself, a competent scholar and an indifferent athlete, got scant attention from her contemporaries—until, one day at recess, they discovered that she could hit a higher note and hold it longer than anyone present.
Since then, Margaret Truman's voice has become one of the most heatedly discussed topics in the nation.
Not for Children. Close friends in both Washington and Independence, Mo. have a way of referring to Margaret's sudden eminence as "this thing"—much as though it were a crippling disease of childhood or a family scandal best left unmentioned. Perhaps they protest too much that everything is just the same as it was before the Truman family was translated to the
White House. Bess and Harry Truman have done their best to preserve the pleasant fiction. But the fact remains that the American public takes a deep, proprietary interest in anyone who lives rent-free at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
It reserves the right to poke, pry, carp, coo and criticize at will.
The White House, Harry Truman once said, is no place to bring up a child. When the Trumans moved in, Washington's newsmen, deprived of the exciting round of dogs, diaries, Balls and divorces that had romped through the presidential quarters during the twelve Roosevelt years, aimed their pencils hopefully at Margaret!
Margaret Truman was 21 and marriageable—the first marriageable White House daughter in more than a quarter of a century. Gossip columnists hopefully reminded their readers of the wooing and winning of T.R.'s daughter Alice by Nicholas Longworth, and the marriages of the Wilsons, father & daughters. They noticed, and noted in their syndicated columns, every young man Margaret saw more than once.
On Delaware Street. Margaret's mother, a reticent woman who has never made any bones about preferring Independence to Washington, did her best to pull the White House blinds down. "I will always be a part of Missouri," said Bess Truman. In Missouri, "nice people" do not peer into other nice people's windows.