Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here 
A new report on burial plans for Harry Truman daughter Margaret Truman Daniel raises a sub question to a larger question: if Presidents insist on pharaohic entombment in their Presidential Libraries, do we have to put up with their relatives as well? Margaret’s ashes are to be buried at the Truman Library along with her late husband’s.
Space is already set aside for Betty Ford 
and the Bush’s plans appear well advanced. 
Who gets the twins?
Murky Record 
She was billed as a singer during the Truman Administration, but the late Margaret Truman achieved greater fame for cashing in with an interminable stream of Murder At The [insert known DC landmark here] novels carrying her name.
Perhaps the definitive excavation of the Margaret Truman books and who may have actually written them appeared in The Weekly Standard. Jon L. Breen toured the murky world of celebrity ghost written novels, with a hard stare at the Truman industry.
Breen fingers Donald Bain, whose works under his own name have a respectable following. Perhaps now we’ll learn the facts. Or maybe not. The long dead Eliot Roosevelt continues to pump out the paper.
And when imagination completely failed: 
Ghost Walker 
Only a year ago, America’s New Years Celebrations were sandwiched around a very different send-off, America’s Gerald Ford
.
California
Capitol Hill
National Cathedral
Michigan
If you slept through it all, were under a rock, or had better things to do, endless retrospectives are available via the internets. 
Or order CSPAN’s compilation tape for $24.95.
Lessons were offered and conclusions drawn.
Henry Kissinger offered a spectacularly rosie and utterly false portrait of Ford’s alignment with South Africa in the 70s. Dick Cheney watched too much television coverage and learned that Ford was a spirited amalgam of Truman, Roosevelt and Reagan on their good days.
And did you know, he was “our most athletic President“?
Ford memorializing rumbles along, albeit at a slower pace then the Reagan juggernaut. Michigan hopes to dump a long-time Capitol Hill statue to make room for Ford, and in real estate Gerry Ford brings the swank. The long time Alexandria Virginia resident and beloved deceased President will be honored by a “President Ford Lane” and a park in an exciting new “mega mansion” development. But there’s more. The park is to be marked by “appropriate signage, historical and informational plaque, and, hopefully, a three dimensional statue or bust of President Ford.”
Return to Yesteryear 
Freed from the burdens of Front Runnership, John McCain has the time to let his mind run free, dreaming of his likely never-to-be Presidency.
Engaging in the one-on-one interaction so prized by New Hampshire voters, Mccain gave a tour of his most admired Presidents.
The Boston Globe managed to feign surprise that Harry Truman made the list. And not for the glories of the early Cold War, firing MacArthur or integrating the Army.
McCain’s Truman fixation was on the little man strolling about with a single bodyguard.
“”He could walk out of the White House and take a walk with one Secret Service agent. One Secret Service agent!…My, how times have changed.””
Indeed. In 1951.
Truman’s temporary home at Blair House was attacked by Puerto Rican Nationalists. A policeman and one of the Nationalists died. 
Congress responded by formalizing the Secret Service’s protective role, and enumerating who would be covered.
Plain Spoken, Flame Broiled 
Harry Truman’s real estate/memorial empire continues to blossom, despite his death 35 years ago, adding properties he couldn’t possibly remember and some he’d probably just as soon forget.
The House has passed a bill directing the Secretary of the Interior to consider adding the Harry Truman Birthplace 
to the National Park Service. Mr. Feisty spent his formative first eleven months in the home, which has been a state park since 1959 when the United Auto Workers gave it to Missouri. The site closed due to unspecified “hazardous conditions” shortly after the House vote.
The Independence Missouri house Truman lived in before and after his presidency 
was acquired by the Park Service in the 1980s. Since then they have gobbled up two Truman in-law houses around the 
corner, and acquired a neighboring house at 216 North Delaware. 
.
The NPS bought into trouble with these homes and two of them are getting new foundations.
The Park Service does own the Truman farm 
near town where young Harry slaved for his father until World War I saved him, but the “boyhood home” at 909 West Waldo in Independence 
remains in private hands.
The Truman Historic Site sits in an historic district named for him, and in theory there’s nothing to stop the Park Service from buying them everything in sight.
