To Truman, Ike Was More First Sarge Than General

He was known for his plain speaking, and Harry S. Truman was planning to do just that about his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, calling him surly and disagreeable in notes for a book never completed. “It’s interesting that a single thing, that great smile of Eisenhower’s, gave him the reputation of being a sunny and amiable man,” Truman wrote, “when those of us who knew him well were all too aware that he was essentially a surly, angry and disagreeable man . . . . “ Not only did he not like Ike, Truman also found Eisenhower to be one of eight presidents the country could have done without, saying “he didn’t do a thing as President.” Other chief executives that Truman had little respect for were Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Truman’s comments, many of which were dictated to secretaries and relatives in the years between his departure from the White House in 1953 and his death in 1972, have been collected in a book titled “More Plain Speaking,” edited by his daughter, Margaret Truman, and Scott Meredith. Parts of the book will appear in Sunday’s Parade magazine. A violin painstakingly crafted in 1709 by Antonio Stradivari was purchased for $889,240 in a tense, two-minute auction bidding war in London won by an unidentified South American buyer. The sum was a record auction price for a musical instrument. The violin was named for Marie Hall, the renowned English musician who had at one time owned the instrument. The Marie Hall had been expected to sell for around $846,000, and bidding started at $376,000, said Sotheby’s, the auction house. “It was quite drawn out and tense and there was a round of applause at the end,” said Sotheby’s spokeswoman Beth McHattie. The Guinness Book of Records says the highest known price for a Stradivarius was $1.2 million, paid in a private sale of the Stradivarius Alard violin to a Singapore buyer on an unknown date. In a tradition extending back through the centuries, Pope John Paul II washed the feet of 12 priests in a Holy Thursday ritual re-enacting Jesus Christ’s Last Supper with the apostles. During the evening ceremony at the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome, the 67-year-old pontiff, wearing a protective apron, poured water from a golden urn onto one foot of each priest, wiping it with a white cloth before bending down to kiss it. Today, the Pope is to carry a wooden cross in the traditional Good Friday ceremony starting from the torch-lit Colosseum.