Margaret Truman Daniel, 83, president's daughter, author

Margaret Truman joined her father, President Truman, as he played for a crowd in New Britain, Conn. (ap/file 1952)

LOS ANGELES - Margaret Truman Daniel, who was the only child of the late President Harry S. Truman and his wife, Bess, and who forged careers as a concert singer, actress, high-profile wife and mother, and prolific biographer and mystery novelist, died yesterday. She was 83.

A cause of death was not announced. Mrs. Daniel, the widow of former New York Times managing editor Clifton Daniel, died in Chicago after a brief illness, according to the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Mo.

A longtime resident of New York, she recently moved to an assisted-living facility in Chicago, where her eldest son, Clifton Truman Daniel, lives.

Mrs. Daniel was a George Washington University student when her father, the vice president, ascended to the presidency upon the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945.

Lessons in the perils of unwanted celebrity were instant. She set off a public relations food fight when she instructed a waiter, "No potatoes, please," and later commented that she drank tomato juice while dieting. The Potato Growers Association peppered the White House with protest letters. The Tomato Growers Association countered with an onslaught of supportive letters. Both groups waged a marketing war in the national media.

When she was photographed wearing a scarf, Women's Wear Daily editorialized that she had damaged the millinery industry, a dispute quieted only after she wore a hat to another event.

Suddenly aware that what she said, what she did, and how she looked would make her the most spotlighted White House offspring in history, Margaret Truman muted her comments. She largely postponed dating to avoid false reports of pending engagements.

For seven years, she said later, her goal was to behave so that she wouldn't "wind up with a bad headline." In the process, she developed a lifelong disdain for Washington and privately came to refer to the White House as "the great white jail."

What Margaret Truman would not abandon was her quest - somewhat unusual for a well-to-do young woman of the mid-20th century - for a career.

First came singing.

Although she majored in history, she had taken voice lessons from childhood and was determined to make it as a concert singer. From 1947 until 1954, she sang operatic and classical selections at sold-out concerts across the country, receiving a warm reception from affectionate audiences, but frigid reaction from critics.

"She is extremely attractive on stage," Washington Post music critic Paul Hume wrote. "Yet Miss Truman cannot sing very well. She is flat a good deal of the time."

After the president read the review the next morning, he wrote to Hume: "I've just read your lousy review of Margaret's concert. . . . When you write such poppycock . . . it shows conclusively that you're off the beam.

"Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below," the president wrote.

In "Harry S. Truman," Mrs. Daniel wrote: "Dad discussed the letter with his aides and was annoyed to find that they all thought it was a mistake. They felt that it damaged his image as president and would only add to his political difficulties. 'Wait till the mail comes in,' Dad said. 'I'll make you a bet that 80 percent of it is on my side of the argument.' "

Mounds of mail came. Her father was right. " 'The trouble with you guys is,' Dad said to the staff as he strode back to work, 'you just don't understand human nature,' " she wrote.

Her friends thought the critics drove her away from singing, but Mrs. Daniel insisted she became more interested in acting.

She had appeared in college productions and in a few radio programs for children. That limited experience, combined with encouragement from actress Helen Hayes, name recognition, and an able agent, won her a professional radio play debut opposite James Stewart in 1951. She portrayed Stewart's wife in an NBC adaptation of the 1950 motion picture comedy "The Jackpot."

Mrs. Daniel was under contract to NBC and from 1954 to 1961, cohosted "Authors in the News" and in 1955-56 cohosted with Mike Wallace the radio program "Weekday."

In 1956, her marriage at 32 to Daniel and the subsequent birth of four sons sharply curtailed her acting career. She settled into the role of wife, mother, and New York society matron, a happiness dimmed when she moved back to Washington in the 1970s when her husband became Washington bureau chief for the Times.

But another career was gestating. And ironically, critics were kinder about the efforts of Mrs. Daniel the untrained writer than they had ever been about her carefully tutored efforts as a singer.

She wrote her first book in self-defense. Knowing that an unauthorized biography of her life was planned, she wanted to head it off by relating her own life in her own way. "Souvenir: Margaret Truman's Own Story" was written with the help of Margaret Cousins and published in 1956.

That account of her Missouri childhood, life in the White House, and as a concert singer was greeted by the New York Herald Tribune book review as "a gracefully written tale of an average American girl drawn by chance into the White House."

In 1972, she published the best-selling 1972 biography of her father, "Harry S. Truman." Critics praised its personal insights into Truman as a family man and its candor in relating such incidents as Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain telling Truman in 1952 he had considered him an inept successor to Roosevelt. The British statesman added, she wrote: "I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization."

Her affinity for mystery-novel writing perhaps brought Mrs. Daniel her greatest fame, second only to her stint as first daughter. An avid reader of the novels, she mentioned to her agent that she had an idea for a murder set in the White House. The concept of a former resident concocting a murder story in that setting was irresistible. "Murder in the White House" was published in 1980.

Her son Clifton had his own wry explanation for his mother's mystery-writing career, writing in his memoir: "My mother seems to have a strong opinion, often bad, of almost everyone in Washington. That's why she writes those murder mysteries; so she can kill them all off, one at a time."

She would write 20 mysteries.

Her father died in 1972. Her husband died in 2000, the same year their son, William, was fatally struck by a car. Mrs. Daniel leaves three sons, Clifton, Harrison, and Thomas, and five grandchildren.