Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip

by Matthew Algeo

  At the 1944 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, party leaders decided to kick Vice President Henry Wallace off the ticket. They regarded Wallace, a plant geneticist who dabbled in mysticism and astrology, as far too liberal, something of a loose cannon, and, well, a little strange. Truman, who always insisted he never campaigned for the job, was chosen to replace Wallace, largely because the other contenders were either too liberal or too conservative. “I had never even seen Truman in my life before he was nominated,” remembered Democratic National Committee Chairman Edward J. Flynn. “All I knew was that no one could do Roosevelt any good, and it was a question of who would do him the least harm.” Franklin Roosevelt, who didn’t even bother to attend the convention, went along with the choice, though he complained he hardly knew the senator. Truman’s candidacy was, reporters joked, another “Missouri Compromise.” Bess Truman, who already thought the family was spending far too much time away from Independence, was not happy. After the convention, Harry, Bess, and Margaret drove home. The atmosphere inside the car, Margaret later recalled, was “close to arctic.” It was the last long drive Harry and Bess would take for many years.

  A month later, Roosevelt invited Truman to the White House for lunch. Truman, who hadn’t even seen the president in a year, was shocked by his appearance. “I had no idea he was in such a feeble condition,” Truman confided to a friend. “In pouring cream in his tea, he got more cream in the saucer than he did in the cup.” In photographs taken of the two men that day, Roosevelt is hunched and haggard, with dark bags beneath his eyes. Truman is beaming, vibrant. It was hard to believe that Roosevelt was only two years older than Truman.

  The Roosevelt-Truman ticket won the 1944 election in a landslide. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. Truman had been vice president eighty-two days. Apart from cabinet meetings, he had met with Roosevelt just twice.

  Truman would win the White House in his own right in 1948, famously upsetting Thomas E. Dewey and most political prognosticators.

  His presidency had encompassed some of the most monumental events of the twentieth century: World War II, the founding of the United Nations, McCarthyism, Korea, the Cold War.

  Sitting on that dais on that winter’s day in 1953, the summer of 1922 must have seemed like a very long time ago to Harry Truman.

  Eisenhower droned on: “Freedom is pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark …”

  Truman’s mind wandered still. Perhaps he pondered his uncertain future. He was sixty-eight now, but quite hale. On most mornings he still walked two miles before breakfast, at his old army pace of 120 steps per minute. And longevity was in his genes: his mother had lived to be ninety-four. (His father had died at sixty-two of complications from surgery for a hernia.) By any estimation, Harry Truman had a lot of life left.

  But what to do with it? Truman, a student of history, well knew that ex-presidents often faded into obscurity, irrelevancy—or worse. There were notable exceptions, of course. After their presidential terms, John Quincy Adams was elected to the House of Representatives and William H. Taft was appointed chief justice. But, more often, an ex-president’s life was one of disappointment and disillusionment. Martin Van Buren and Theodore Roosevelt both tried to regain the presidency without success. John Tyler was elected to Congress—the Confederate Congress. He died before he could take office, but most Northerners considered him a traitor, and his passing was barely noted in Northern newspapers. Franklin Pierce, a raging alcoholic, reportedly said there was nothing to do but “get drunk” after the presidency. This he did with astonishing abandon, until it killed him, though hardly anybody noticed.

  Herbert Hoover, seated just a few feet from Truman on the dais that day, was the only other living member of the ex-presidents club. After his humiliating defeat in 1932, Hoover had lived in political isolation—until his career was resuscitated by Truman himself.

  Hoover, at least, was rich. He’d made a fortune in mining before going into politics. At the time, ex-presidents received no pension, and some had died broke. Thomas Jefferson was forced to sell his beloved library to make ends meet. James Monroe was so destitute he had to move in with his daughter and her husband. Ulysses S. Grant, his life savings lost in a swindle, had just eighty dollars in the bank at one point. He was saved from penury only by selling his memoirs to Mark Twain. “They just … let them starve to death,” Truman complained of the country’s treatment of its ex-presidents soon after he left the White House.

  Truth was, Harry Truman didn’t know what to do with the rest of his life. He had no specialized training, nothing more than a high school diploma. (He is the last president without a postsecondary degree.) There was speculation that he might make another run for office, perhaps as a senator or governor back in Missouri. He could even run for the White House again if he wanted to: he was the last president eligible to serve more than two terms. Theoretically, anyway, in four years he could be standing once more in the very spot where Eisenhower now stood.

  One thing was certain, though: Harry Truman needed money. He wasn’t destitute, but he was far from rich, and he knew his post-presidential expenses would be considerable. He had already rented an office in Kansas City, and he would need at least two assistants just to answer the mail. Besides, he felt obligated to maintain a certain standard of living, if only to uphold the dignity of the office he had just vacated.

  Yet his only income would be a pension for his service as an officer in France during World War I. That pension amounted to $111.96 a month, after taxes. Ironically, he did not receive credit for his nearly eight years as commander in chief.

  Truman had come to the presidency with little personal wealth. When he took office, the salary was seventy-five thousand dollars a year, but out of that he was expected to pay all White House expenses. One year he netted just forty-two hundred dollars. In 1949 the salary was raised to a hundred thousand dollars plus fifty thousand for expenses, but this was still barely enough to cover the growing cost of running the White House, and Truman was able to save little. A few months before leaving office, Truman had met with Martin Stone, a lawyer–turned–television mogul, to discuss his post-presidential job prospects. “The president was frank that he’d be needing money when he returned to his modest home,” Stone recalled.

  Finally, Eisenhower concluded his inaugural address: “The peace we seek … is nothing less than the practice and fulfillment of our whole faith among ourselves and in our dealings with others…. This is the work that awaits us all, to be done with bravery, with charity, and with prayer to Almighty God. My citizens, thank you.” The speech had lasted nineteen minutes.

  A wave of applause rolled toward the dais, snapping Truman out of his reverie.

  After the ceremony, the Trumans were driven to the home of Dean Acheson, Harry’s erstwhile secretary of state, for a farewell luncheon. As his driver negotiated the teeming Inauguration Day streets of Washington, the new ex-president experienced his first taste of civilian life: the long black White House limousine obeyed all traffic signals. It was the first time in nearly eight years that Harry Truman had stopped for a red light.

  After lunch, the Trumans stopped by the home of Harry’s longtime personal secretary, Matthew Connelly, where Harry took his customary afternoon nap. Around 4:00 P.M., they were driven to Union Station to catch the train back home to Independence.

  At the station, Harry and Bess bade farewell to their Secret Service detail. Just as they received no pensions, ex-presidents at that time received no government-financed bodyguards. The Trumans were no longer, in Secret Service parlance, protectees. They were on their own now.

  As president, Harry often took walks around Washington. Here he is in 1950, walking from his temporary home in the Blair House to the White House, accompanied by Secret Service agents. (The White House was being renovated at the time.)

  The Trumans would ride home in the presidential railcar, the Ferdinand Magellan, which was attached to the end of the Baltimore & Ohio Railr
oad’s regular National Limited. Truman had undertaken his historic whistle-stop campaign on board the Ferdinand Magellan in 1948. The car was now at Eisenhower’s disposal, of course, but the new president had offered it to the Trumans in an effort to mend fences. Truman appreciated the gesture, but for the time being, anyway, he kept the hatchet very much unburied.

  Unexpectedly, a crowd of over three thousand had gathered at Union Station to see the Trumans off: senators, members of Congress, supreme court justices, generals, admirals, old friends, foreign diplomats, ordinary Washingtonians. They sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and “Auld Lang Syne.” “Good-bye, Mr. President,” they shouted. “Good-bye, Harry!” Many wept. Said prim Dean Acheson with uncharacteristic folksiness, “We’re saying good-bye to the greatest guy that ever was.” The Trumans were deeply moved by the impromptu going away party. “I can’t adequately express my appreciation for what you are doing,” Harry told the crowd from the rear platform of the Ferdinand Magellan. “I’ll never forget it if I live to be a hundred—and that’s just what I intend to do!” At six-thirty, the valves underneath the train hissed and the conductor called out, “All aboard.” As the train slowly pulled out of the station, Harry and Bess stood waving from the back platform. They seemed reluctant for the moment to end. They kept waving as the train disappeared into the Washington night. “They’ve gone back to Missouri,” a porter said wistfully as he watched the couple fade into darkness.

  The twenty-six-hour ride home was reminiscent of the whistle-stop campaign. At each stop along the way, great crowds came out to say farewell to their erstwhile president. “Crowd at Silver Spring, Md., some three or four hundred,” wrote Truman in his diary. “Crowd at Harpers Ferry, Grafton, and it was reported to me at every stop all night long. Same way across Indiana and Illinois.” The outpouring was touching. It was also surprising, because Harry Truman was not very popular when he left the White House, mainly due to the stalemate in Korea. In 1952 his approval rating in a Gallup Poll had sunk to 22 percent—a record low unmatched until 2008. On the eve of his departure, newspaper columnist Walter Trohan called Truman “one of the most mediocre men ever to inherit power…. Our Harry has rattled around in the White House like a peanut in a ball room and has floundered in the president’s chair.” Yet, as the outpouring of affection on the trip home attested, many Americans were beginning to realize just what they were losing.

  Several times on the ride home Truman left the Ferdinand Magellan to stroll through the rest of the train, stopping frequently to chat with passengers. It was something he hadn’t been able to do in eight years, to move about as he wished, unencumbered by Secret Service agents. When he walked into one car and the passengers began to rise in deference, Truman stopped them. “Don’t get up,” he said. “I’m no longer president.”

  At 7:15 on the morning after the inauguration—Truman’s first full day as ex-president—the train stopped for a fifteen-minute layover in Cincinnati. Truman disembarked with the other passengers and waited patiently in line to buy the morning papers at the station’s newsstand. A photographer spotted him and called out, “Look this way, Mr. President.” “I’m not ‘Mr. President’ anymore,” Truman answered with a smile. “I’m just plain Harry Truman.” This was a point of etiquette unresolved at the time. America still didn’t know what to call its former chief executives. “I don’t care what people call me,” Truman said when asked how he should be addressed. “I’ve been called everything.” But Truman made it clear that he always called Herbert Hoover “Mr. President.” “Like a five-star general or admiral,” Truman explained, “[a president] doesn’t have his former rank taken away on retirement.” In time, it would become customary to address Truman and all other ex-presidents as “Mr. President.”

  The train reached Independence at 8:05 that night. The reception was positively tumultuous. More than eight thousand people swarmed the town’s tiny depot to welcome Harry and Bess home. As they stepped from the Ferdinand Magellan for the last time and began making their way through the massive crowd, an American Legion band struck up “The Missouri Waltz” (never mind that Truman hated the song). The Trumans were overwhelmed with emotion. Standing behind a forest of microphones planted on the platform, Harry addressed the crowd. He joked about being in the “army of the unemployed”—though he was quick to add that it was a “small army.”

  “I can’t tell you how much we appreciate this reception,” he said. “It’s magnificent—much more than we anticipated. It’s a good feeling to be back home.” Bess could barely speak. “I’m just delighted to be home,” she said. “This is certainly a wonderful welcome.” When they finally reached their house at 219 North Delaware Street, another fifteen hundred people were waiting to greet them. “Mrs. T. and I were overcome,” Truman later wrote of that night. “It was the payoff for thirty years of hell and hard work.”

  Harry and Bess walked hand in hand into the house. The next morning Harry was asked what he planned to do. “Take the grips up to the attic,” he said, using the old-fashioned word for suitcases.

  Retirement, as it has come to be known, is a relatively recent concept. The first edition of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828, lists four meanings for the word, none of which mention age. You worked until you couldn’t work anymore, in which case your family, probably large, provided for you. Or you worked until you died. No gold watches, no pensions, no Social Security.

  But older workers had no place in the Industrial Revolution. They couldn’t operate the newfangled machinery as nimbly as younger workers. And assembly lines were only as efficient as their weakest link, which was usually an older worker. The aged were simply in the way, and many employers began wondering how best to get rid of them.

  The answer, suggested a Johns Hopkins professor named William Osler in a 1905 lecture, was “a peaceful departure by chloroform.” Osler was being facetious (one hopes), but his point was serious. Osler believed men over forty contributed little to society. “Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature—subtract the work of the men above forty and … we would practically be where we are today.”

  As for men over sixty, Osler thought them completely useless. His proposal, short of chloroform, was mandatory retirement. There would be an “incalculable benefit … if, as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.” (Osler, who was fifty-five at the time, would live another fifteen years—and never retire.)

  But older workers couldn’t afford to stop working. They needed the money. In response, some employers began offering pensions—in the name of efficiency, not altruism. Funded by younger, lower-paid employees, pensions gave older workers the means to retire—sometimes involuntarily. A foreman in a Connecticut textile mill recalled how one worker was “retired” in 1916:

  Old Mr. McGuire, Jim McGuire’s father, used to make spools, and he was getting to be a pretty old man. He’d go over to the storage bin, and sometimes he’d only bring one spool at a time…. Well, finally, I spoke to [a supervisor], and I guess he mentioned it in the office because Mr. Shields come out. He got me and Mr. McGuire together, and he said, “We have decided that you have worked long and hard. And you always done good work too. And we think it is time you had a rest. So we have decided to pension you, and we will give you $55 a month, and you can have your house free as long as you live. But that doesn’t mean your wife can have it free after that.” … So the old man was pensioned off. You know, it’s a funny thing about them pensions. Practically everybody that gets one dies pretty soon after.

  But by 1932, just 15 percent of American workers were eligible for private pensions. Not until the Social Security Act was signed by FDR in 1935 were most workers guaranteed at least some income after retirement.

  As a government employee, however, Harry Truman did not qualify for Social Security. And he’d left the Senate too soon to qualify for a congressional pension.

  His only income was that army p
ension.

  2

  Independence, Missouri,

  Winter and Spring, 1953

  No twentieth-century president retired to more humble surroundings than Harry Truman. When not traveling the world, Teddy Roosevelt returned to Sagamore Hill, his estate on Long Island. Woodrow Wilson retreated to a fashionable townhouse in Washington, the only ex-president to stay in the capital. Herbert Hoover eventually settled into a plush suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Gerald Ford would retire to the pristine golf courses of Palm Desert, California. Bill Clinton would choose tony Westchester County, New York (mainly so his wife could run for the Senate).

  But when Harry Truman left the White House in 1953, he returned to the same rambling, slightly ramshackle, two-and-a-half-story Victorian that he and Bess had lived in since their marriage thirty-four years earlier. It had been painted white when he became president in 1945, and hadn’t been painted again since. There was no air-conditioning. The only indication that it was the home of a luminary was the iron fence that surrounded the property. It had been erected in 1949 at the behest of Herbert Hoover, who had warned Truman that souvenir hunters would “tear the place down” otherwise. (Hoover said the doorknobs had been stolen off his childhood home in Iowa. Presumably he suffered no such thievery at the Waldorf.)

  Known locally as the Gates-Wallace home, the house on Delaware Street was built, in fits and spurts, by George Porterfield Gates, Bess’s maternal grandfather, between 1867 and 1895. Bess, her three brothers, and her mother, Madge Gates Wallace, moved into the house in 1904 after Bess’s father committed suicide. After he married Bess, Harry moved into the already-crowded house as well. It was in their second-floor bedroom that their only child, Margaret, was born during a snowstorm on February 17, 1924. After Madge Gates Wallace died at age ninety in 1952, Harry and Bess bought out her brothers’ shares of the property, and, for the first time in their lives, the Trumans owned their own home. They would never own another.