Bess Truman - Death and Longevity

Death and Longevity

In 1953 the Trumans went back to Independence and the family home at 219 North Delaware Street, where the former president worked on building his library and writing his memoirs. Following a 1959 mastectomy Bess thought she was going to die (her husband was quoted as saying the tumor was the size of a basketball, but it was benign).

When President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law in 1965, the Trumans were the first to be given its benefits.

At the time of her husband's death in 1972 at age 88, she was 87 making them the oldest couple having occupied the White House at that time. Bess agreed to be the honorary chairman for the reelection campaign of Sen. Thomas Eagleton (D-Missouri).

Bess continued to live quietly in Independence for the last decade of her life, being visited by her daughter and grandchildren. She died October 18, 1982, from congestive heart failure at the age of 97; a private funeral service was held October 21, afterwards she was buried beside her husband in the courtyard of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Aged 97 years at her death she remains the longest lived First Lady in United States history. There were only three close relatives of a US president to live longer than Bess Truman. They were James Madison's mother, Nelly Conway Madison, who died in 1829 at the age of 98, and John F. Kennedy's mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, who died aged 104 in 1995, and grandmother, Mary Josephine Hannon Fitzgerald, who died aged 98 in 1964.