Margaret Truman Daniel

She was a junior in college and the nation was in deep mourning when she first entered the pubic eye. Roosevelt had died suddenly in April 1945, elevating his considerably less charismatic vice-president to the top office.

Truman was sometimes referred to, snidely, as the haberdasher from Missouri. He had been in the clothing trade before his political career. Margaret was a witty, hard-working Midwestern girl with singing talent who was neither particularly pretty nor terribly plain. A performer of classical music, she was famously defended from hostile criticism by her doting father, who threatened to punch a Washington Post music critic in the nose when he gave her a withering review.

Mary Margaret Truman was born in 1924, in Independence, Missouri. She attended public school there until 1934, when her father joined the US Senate. Until 1942 she attended autumn semesters in Independence and spring semesters at Gunston Hall, a private school for girls in Washington. She graduated from George Washington University with a BA in history in 1946. Her father was the commencement speaker at her graduation ceremony.

She had begun voice training as a child in Missouri. In 1946 she made her concert debut, signing for a national radio audience of some 15 million with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Reviews were mixed. Yet she went on to perform in 30 cities. She appeared at the Hollywood Bowl before a crowd of approximately 20,000 people, with Eugene Ormandy conducting a 90-piece orchestra. She played Carnegie Hall, and was signed by RCA Victor Red Seal Records.

She later wrote that her status as First Daughter was both a help and a hindrance to her singing career. She was given effortless publicity and exceptional access to prestigious venues, but, she believed, the critics and elite audiences held her to higher-than-usual standards.

In 1950 she made an appearance at Constitution Hall in Washington. The fallout may have dimmed the lustre of her singing career but it improved her father’s image. Paul Hume, the music critic of The Washington Post was aggressively tepid in his review of her performance. She “cannot sing very well”, he wrote, “is flat a good deal of the time”, and lacks “professional finish”. This riled the President, who called the review “lousy”, and warned Hume, with graphic specificity, that he would “need a new nose, and plenty of beefsteak and perhaps a supporter below”, should he ever meet the Commander-in-Chief face to face.

Needless to say, the incident made the front page. Asked by the press for a response, Margaret praised her father’s chivalry. But the President’s advisers cringed at his unconditional fatherly pride and lack of restraint.

Later, in a biography of her father, Margaret revealed that the President’s staff thought the incident might damage him politically. But Truman, who was so often underestimated, proposed a wager. He bet them that mail would flood in from citizens who supported his blind - not to say tone-deaf - paternal love. He was right, according to Margaret’s account. A few days later, he frogmarched his staff to the mail room; Americans, who had sent sacks of letters, had given his threat of bodily harm in defence of his daughter an 80 per cent approval rating.

Nevertheless, Margaret’s singing career was on the wane. She travelled to Europe with friends. During the 1950s she worked in broadcasting. In 1955, substituting for Edward R. Murrow on his television show Person to Person, she interviewed her parents, again positioning herself as both a celebrity in her own right and a power offspring. In 1955 and 1956 she acted as hostess on a radio programme called Weekday. In February 1965 she started her first daily television show as co-host on a half-hour special events programme. She had her own nationally syndicated interview programme for eight years. She also acted on stage, in comedies.

She had already published her first book, an autobiography entitled Souvenir, in 1956. Commercially attuned, she did a book on White House pets in 1969, followed by a biography of her father.

The idea of doing a mystery, Murder in the White House, came to her “out of nowhere”, she said. The mysteries that she churned out rarely strayed outside the Beltway: the Supreme Court, the Smithsonian, Embassy Row, the Pentagon and the CIA provided her settings. The last book, Murder on K Street, was released last year. A ghost writer was rumoured to have helped with the books, but that was never confirmed.

“I’ve had three or four different careers,” she told an interviewer in 1989. “I consider being a wife and mother a career. I have great respect for women - both those who go out and do their thing and those who stay at home. I think those who stay at home have a lot more courage than those who go out and get a job.”

Throughout her twenties she had deflected reporters’ questions about her marriage prospects. Unusually, for her generation, she was more interested in a career than in a husband. Then she met Clifton Daniel, a dashing foreign correspondent who later rose through the ranks at The New York Times, at a dinner party in 1955. The romance was kept a secret until a month before their wedding in April 1956.

Daniel wrote later: “We were the kind of people who wouldn’t marry anybody our mothers wouldn’t approve of: a couple of citified small-towners, puritans among the fleshpots.” The couple had four sons. In 1973 the family moved from New York to Washington where Daniel became chief of the New York Times Washington bureau. They moved back to New York City in 1977 when he retired.

In addition to her writing Margaret was honorary co-chair of the Harry S. Truman Library Institute. Since 1977 she had served as secretary to the board of trustees of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, which awards scholarships to college students planning careers in government. In 1979 she toured the country on behalf of the Toy Manufacturers of America, an industry association.

Her accomplishments, admirable in their own right, were inevitably entwined with - and perhaps weighted down by - her father’s presidency. She was the 1984 recipient of the Harry S. Truman Public Service Award, presented annually by the city of Independence to an outstanding US citizen. In late life she was a grandmother, and sang in her church choir.

Her husband predeceased her in 2000. One of their four sons, William, died in the same year, and she is survived by her three remaining sons.

Margaret Truman Daniel, singer and writer, was born on February 17, 1924. She died on January 29, 2008, aged 83