The President was My Footnote (PDF)

A chance encounter with a former president. A classroom challenge that becomes a national moment. A decision that changes the fate of the world.

In "The President Was My Footnote", Joe Kidd braids meticulous history with an intimate, firsthand relationship to Harry S. Truman.

The story begins far from the Situation Room, in a high school history class in Independence, Missouri. Assigned to write about a decision made by President Truman, a determined student secures permission to work in the restricted archive at the Truman Presidential Library—only to be caught there by Truman himself. What follows is a remarkable apprenticeship: days of recorded interviews, long conversations in a modest office beneath Thomas Hart Benton’s mural “Independence and the Opening of the West,” and an unexpected friendship between a plainspoken former president and a young conservative who lives just three blocks away.