Letter from Harry S. Truman to Eleanor Roosevelt

THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON May 31, 1947 My dear Mrs. Roosevelt: I appreciated very much your letter of the sixteenth and, as you know, my only effort has been to carry out what I thought were the wishes of the late President, You perhaps are not familiar with the facts - Brewster, Ferguson and a few of the Republican Chairmen in the House are extremely anxious to conduct a fishing expedition through the private files of President Roosevelt and that I am trying to prevent with all the power that I have. There are certain confidential communications which passed between him and some of the heads of States which should not be published at this time. This is particularly true of the correspondence between him and Mr. Stalin. I don't see how he continued as patiently as he did with developments as they were then progressing, but he didn't let his personal feelings enter into his international commitments and the country is certainly lucky that that was the case. It is my intention, as soon as the Republican Congress has exhausted its investigative program, to have all the papers of the late President placed in the Library at Hyde Park where he wanted them. There are some of his papers which are necessary to keep here in The White House until the Treaties are signed. Hardly a week goes by that I do not find it necessary to read some of these communications to find out just exactly what our commitments are. He never had an opportunity to tell me everything that had taken place. I imagine I have read a mile of documents since I have been in this office and I still have to read more of them when conditions come up which are affected by those agreements. I have carried out every commitment that the late President made to the letter, and expect to continue to carry them out. Our friends, the Russians, have failed to carry out a single commitment they made either with him or with me, but we still are trying to get a peaceful settlement for both the European and Asiatic situation.