Merle Miller’s Mendacity

Merle Miller is best known as the author of Plain Speaking, which purports to be a record of interviews Miller had with former President Harry S Truman in the early 1960s. Those interviews became the basis for the play Give ‘Em Hell, Harry. Miller’s book is proof of the wisdom of Mark Twain’s words, “a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets out of the bed in the morning.” Miller did not publish the book until after Truman’s death in 1972, which should have raised some red flags. This gave Miller the opportunity to pass off some complete fabrications without Truman being around to contradict them. One of Miller’s most egregious fabrications concerns Truman’s meeting with MacArthur on Wake Island in October of 1950. According to Miller’s account, a message from MacArthur’s plane claimed they were having engine trouble and would not be able to land until after the arrival of Truman’s plane, thus giving MacArthur the chance to make a grand entrance. This canard is repeated in the play Give ‘Em Hell, Harry and was depicted in the television movie about the Truman/MacArthur controversy. Although that story is completely false, very few people have ever questioned Miller’s deception. In Truman’s memoirs, written in the fifties, he described MacArthur as waiting for him when he arrived on Wake. Anyone diligent enough to research the memoirs of several of Truman’s aides who were at the meeting confirm this. Furthermore, the accounts of MacArthur’s aides confirm that the general arrived on Wake the evening before and had been awaiting the President for a full ten hours. Granted, General of Army Douglas MacArthur was an egomaniac of monumental proportions, given to both insubordination and grandiose gestures, he had so many detractors that almost all of them will believe a story that puts him in a bad light without bothering to check what really happened.

Miller’s other fabrication was even more egregious. Miller quotes Truman as reporting that Eisenhower had planned to divorce his wife, Mamie, and marry his British driver, Kay Summersby Morgan. According to Miller, Truman related that General Marshall threatened Eisenhower with dismissal from the Army if he did not end the affair. If anyone believes that, I have a bridge to sell them in Brooklyn.

By the end of World War II, Eisenhower knew that he had an excellent chance of being elected President of the United States and that a divorce in those days would completely ruin his chances. Ironically, Miller’s book was published while Kay Summersby Morgan was dying of cancer. Members of the press hounded her with questions as she was close to her deathbed. In her final days, Miss Morgan did publish her own memoir, which related that she and Ike enjoyed each others’ company, but the relationship was “almost entirely platonic.”

Miller’s lies managed to sell a lot of books and generate gossip that certainly hurt two people: Kay Summersby Morgan and Mamie Eisenhower, who was still alive at the time. If there’s a moral here, it’s to be skeptical before accepting scandalous gossip at face value.

Kay Summersby Morgan