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In retirement, Truman willingly faded from public life. In Independence, he built a library for his papers of which he was inordinately proud. He still ate at lunch counters, stopped at roadside restaurants on his rare trips, and offered no punditry to later Presidents. He was discontented with the intellectual style of the 1952 candidate, Adlai Stevenson, but could not convey to him what he felt was wrong. Truman was a man of action, and deprived of the power to act, he receded into near anonymity.
When he died, Harry Truman was under no illusion that he was a giant of intellect or even a "great" man. He was, as has been said, perhaps the greatest little man the U.S. has known. In a nation founded on the principle that ultimate wisdom lodges in its citizens, that is no mean accolade.