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

by Matthew Algeo

  On Tuesday, June 23, Harry woke up early and took his usual morning walk—his first in Washington without Secret Service agents in more than eight years. At his usual brisk pace, he covered two miles in thirty minutes, walking along Connecticut Avenue and K Street. He never came within three blocks of the White House. Along the way, he was greeted by passersby, cabbies, truck drivers, and motorists: “Hello, Harry,” “Hello, Mr. President,” “Glad to see you back.”

  Back at the hotel, Truman spent the day welcoming a string of visitors to his suite. One of his callers was the Iranian ambassador to the United States, Allah-Yar Saleh, who presented the former president with a Persian rug. The timing of the meeting is curious, for at that very moment the CIA was plotting to overthrow Saleh’s boss, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and return the shah to the Peacock Throne. The motive, of course, was oil. In 1951, Mossadegh announced plans to nationalize the country’s oilfields. This infuriated the British, who controlled Iran’s oil through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later known as British Petroleum, or BP). The British asked the Truman administration to help them remove Mossadegh. Truman, who was up to his eyeballs in Korea at the time, wasn’t interested—but his successor was. On April 4, 1953, Eisenhower’s director of central intelligence, Allen W. Dulles, signed off on an operation, code-named Ajax, to “bring about the fall of Mossadegh.” The agent in charge of the operation was Kermit Roosevelt—Theodore’s grandson. Iranians working for the agency and posing as communists harassed religious leaders to turn public opinion against Mossadegh. The CIA recruited an Iranian general to lead a coup. On August 19, 1953, demonstrators paid by the CIA attacked Mossadegh’s house. The resulting clashes killed three hundred people. Mossadegh fled, the general was installed as prime minister, and the shah returned to the throne. The British thanked the Americans by opening Iran to U.S. oil companies.

  The CIA considered the coup a shining success and, in the ensuing years, it would inspire similar efforts to overthrow anti-American regimes in Guatemala and Cuba, with decidedly mixed results.

  Mohammed Mossadegh was arrested and, after a show trial, sentenced to death. The shah commuted the sentence to three years’ imprisonment and house arrest for life. Allah-Yar Saleh, Mossadegh’s ambassador to the United States, returned to Iran and led the moderate opposition to the shah’s pro-Western government. The coup set the stage for the Islamic Revolution in 1979, not to mention generations of anti-American sentiment in Iran.

  To Truman, the coup came to symbolize a larger problem: how the CIA, which he had organized in 1947, had been “diverted from its original assignment” of merely collecting intelligence. “It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government,” he wrote in 1963. “This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.”

  The shah, for his part, would curry Truman’s favor for years, sending him Christmas cards every year and get-well cards when he got sick.

  While Harry welcomed callers to his suite, Bess and Margaret attended a tea at the Women’s National Democratic Club. Bess wore a blue lace dress and a matching straw hat. She looked ten years younger, said one guest. She never looked happier, said another. Margaret, wearing a white silk dress with brown velvet trim, was asked if she and her parents planned to do any sightseeing in Washington. “Why go sightseeing in a place where you have lived nineteen years?” she said. “It hasn’t changed that much since January, has it?” She also denied rumors that Harry and Bess would do some house hunting when they visited her the following week in New York. “They are not going to live in New York or Long Island,” she said. “They are going back to Missouri—that’s home.” Margaret also denied reports of a new romantic interest. “No,” she sighed. “I am still looking.”

  Also at the tea was another former first lady, Edith Bolling Wilson, the widow of Woodrow Wilson. It was a rare public appearance for Mrs. Wilson, who was eighty. When someone asked her what first ladies talked about when they got together, she just laughed and shook her head. (Besides Mmes. Truman and Wilson, two other former first ladies were alive at the time, Grace Coolidge and Eleanor Roosevelt.)

  That night, Harry “reconvened” his old cabinet for a fancy dinner in a ballroom at the Mayflower. Seated at the head of a horseshoe-shaped table decorated with wildflowers and fruit-filled epergnes, it must have occurred to the former president that he was less well off than any of his subordinates, most of whom had moved on to lucrative careers in the private sector. Dean Acheson, Agriculture Secretary Charles Brannan, Interior Secretary Oscar L. Chapman, and Attorney General James McGranery had all joined high-profile law firms in Washington. Defense Secretary Robert Lovett was a partner at the investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman. Treasury Secretary John W. Snyder was a vice president at the automaker Willys-Overland. Labor Secretary Maurice J. Tobin was a prosperous businessman in Massachusetts.

  Dean Acheson gave the toast that night, and it was long remembered by those in attendance as one of the best tributes to Truman—or to anyone, for that matter—they had ever heard. Acheson began by recalling how he’d unexpectedly bumped into his old boss on the street the day before. “At that moment,” he said, “I knew how the Korean prisoners felt when the guards opened the stockade gates.”

  Acheson continued,

  Mr. President, we are reliably informed that among the Mohammedans the faithful turn to the East when they pray. In Washington the faithful turn to the West. And so your return is to us a very real answer to prayer….

  President Truman’s fundamental purpose and burning passion has been to serve his country and his fellow citizens. This devoted love of the United States has been the only rival which Mrs. Truman has had….

  The greatest of all commanders never ask more of their troops than they are willing to give themselves…. The president has never asked any of us to do what he would not do. When the time came to fight, he threw everything into it, himself included. And what we all knew was that, however hot the fire was in front, there would never be a shot in the back. Quite the contrary! He stood by us through thick and thin, always eager to attribute successes to us and accept for himself the full responsibility for failure….

  It is for reasons such as these that this visit of yours brings us such happiness. These visits of yours must be regular affairs, for we all badly need the refreshment and inspiration that they bring us.

  To you, Mr. President, and to your enduring health and happiness, we join in a final toast.

  While I was in Washington, another former president returned to the capital—sort of. Jimmy Carter held a book signing at the Books-A-Million in a strip mall in McLean, Virginia, between a wine store and an Advance Auto Parts, and about ten miles west of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

  The ex-presidential book signing is a ritual begun by Harry Truman. In a hotel ballroom in Kansas City on November 2, 1955, Harry autographed four thousand copies of his memoirs. According to his publisher, it was the first time an ex-president had “agreed to sit down and sign copies of his book.” Not that Harry was crazy about the idea. “I will go along with any party arrangements you make for Doubleday,” he wrote one of the publisher’s publicists before the event, “but don’t get me into any advertising for pens, cakes or anything, because I won’t do it.”

  Jimmy Carter’s book signing was scheduled for 7:00 P.M., but when my wife and I showed up at five, about fifty people were already lined up outside the store, which was closed in preparation for the event. A Books-A-Million rep moved up and down the line, making clear the ground rules. Mr. Carter would sign only books—no photographs, no baseballs, no greeting cards. He would sign no more than five books per person, and he would sign only those books that he had authored (he’s written about twenty-five). At least one of the books had to be his new one (A Remarkable Mother, his paean to the indefatigable Miss Lillian). H
e would not personalize inscriptions. He would only sign his name. And he would only sign the title page. We were asked to open our books to that page before presenting them for signing.

  Around 5:45, the line started to move. The former president, it seemed, was running early. Three Secret Service agents stationed at the front door gave us the once-over with handheld metal detectors and poked through our bags. The line wound through a maze of bookshelves. Before we knew it, we were in the presence of the thirty-ninth president (or thirty-eighth, by Truman’s reckoning).

  He sat behind a large faux mahogany desk with a red velvet rope in front of it. Black drapes covered the bookshelves behind him. Secret Service agents stood sentry at each side of the desk. He was wearing a white dress shirt with blue stripes. He hunched slightly as he signed title pages in rapid-fire succession: J Carter, J Carter, J Carter, J Carter. When I examined his autograph later, I was impressed by its legibility.

  When I reached the desk, I handed my books to a Books-A-Million minion, who handed them to the former president. I stepped to the front of the desk as he began to sign them. It reminded me of the “Soup Nazi” episode of Seinfeld. A strict protocol was to be observed, but I wasn’t sure what it was. It was so quiet I could hear the sound of the pen scratching across the page as he signed the first book. This was not like bumping into an ex-president outside the Capitol. It felt a little funereal. The very arrangement discouraged interaction. I wasn’t even sure we were allowed to address the former president. But I was determined to ask him … something. We’d purchased only three books for him to sign. Time was running out. Finally, I blurted out, “Mr. President, did you ever meet Harry Truman?” He stopped signing for a moment and looked up at me. His expression was serious. He seemed to be rummaging through his mental filing cabinets. “No,” he said after a moment in his familiar quiet drawl. “I wish I had.” He resumed signing but continued talking. “I never met another Democratic president until Bill Clinton. I did meet Richard Nixon when I was governor. But I was just a peanut farmer before that, so I never met Harry Truman.” With that our books were signed. I said, “Thank you, Mr. President.” He looked up at me and smiled. He had already started signing the next pile of books.

  Former president Jimmy Carter signing a book for the author at a Books-A-Million bookstore in McLean, Virginia. In 1955, Harry Truman was the first ex-president to hold a book signing.

  Our exchange lasted maybe thirty seconds. Which is probably more face time than anybody else got that night. At his previous book signing, I heard he’d signed sixteen hundred books in ninety minutes. That’s 3.3 seconds per book—less than seventeen seconds for the maximum of five books.

  In this regard, at least, Carter defeats Truman. At his signing in Kansas City, Harry averaged about nine books a minute—a relatively leisurely rate of some seven seconds per book. (Unlike Carter, however, Harry signed his full name—and with “mechanical precision,” according to one eyewitness.)

  On Wednesday, June 24, Harry went back to the Capitol. In room S-211, a committee room just off the Senate floor, he had lunch with forty-four of the forty-seven Democratic senators then serving, including two first-termers, Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy.

  Truman regarded both future presidents with some circumspection. He considered Johnson a trifle too ambitious. (Johnson was just twenty-eight when he was elected to the House in 1937. In 1955, at forty-two, he would become the youngest Senate majority leader in history.) Truman also thought Johnson a bit of a suck-up—and not an altogether accomplished one. When Truman’s mother died in 1947, then-Congressman Johnson obsequiously wrote the president, saying he would donate a book in memory of the “First Mother” to the Grandview Public Library. Truman wrote back and thanked Johnson, but added, “I regret to advise you that Grandview has no Public Library.” Johnson biographer Robert A. Caro said the relationship between the two men “would never be particularly warm,” and Margaret Truman said her father “never quite trusted” Johnson.

  Toward Kennedy, however, Truman felt something approaching antipathy. Elected to Congress at twenty-nine, Kennedy was no less ambitious than Johnson. But at least Johnson had worked his way up from the hard-scrabble Texas Hill Country. Kennedy embodied the kind of elitist sense of entitlement that Truman despised. Furthermore, Truman never cared for Kennedy’s father, the haughty and overbearing Joe Kennedy, whom Truman had once threatened to throw out a hotel window for belittling FDR. When the younger Kennedy’s religion became an issue in the 1960 presidential campaign, Truman quipped, “It’s not the pope I’m afraid of, it’s the pop.” Truman boycotted the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles that year, claiming it had been “rigged” in Kennedy’s favor. But when Kennedy won the nomination, Truman, ever the dutiful Democrat, campaigned for him.

  There is no record of what occurred inside that committee room during lunch that day. Surely Harry gave his standard pep talk. Jack Kennedy was undoubtedly distracted, maybe even a little nervous, for it was his last day as Washington’s most eligible bachelor. That night, he would announce his engagement to a twenty-three-year-old George Washington University graduate whose “Inquiring Camera Girl” column ran in the Washington Times-Herald. Her name was Jacqueline Lee Bouvier.

  Lyndon Johnson, meanwhile, was probably gazing covetously at the ceiling of room S-211, on which was painted a magnificent fresco by the Italian artist Constantino Brumidi. When he became majority leader, Johnson made the room his new office.

  After lunch, the Democratic senators invited Harry onto the Senate floor to visit his old desk. Protocol, however, demanded that he call on the president of the Senate first. So Harry walked across the hall to the office of Richard Nixon and paid what might be the most uncomfortable courtesy call in the annals of Congress. Nixon was one of only two politicians Truman is said to have truly hated. (The other was Lloyd Stark, the Missouri governor who unsuccessfully challenged Truman for his Senate seat in the 1940 Democratic primary.) As a representative and later a senator, Nixon was a constant thorn in Truman’s side. As a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he relentlessly pursued charges that communists had “infiltrated” the Truman administration.

  But it was the 1952 presidential campaign that forever turned Truman against Nixon. Throughout that campaign, Nixon, the Republican vice presidential candidate, had excoriated the Truman administration for supposedly coddling communists. Nixon said “real Democrats” should have been “outraged by the Truman-Acheson-Stevenson gang’s toleration and defense of communism in high places.” Nixon went “down and around over the country and called me a traitor,” Truman bitterly recalled. He would never forgive Nixon. Privately he called him a “squirrel head,” a “son of a bitch”—or worse.

  Harry and Vice President Richard Nixon pose outside Nixon’s office in the Capitol, June 24, 1953. Nixon was one of the two men in politics Harry truly hated.

  But in Nixon’s Senate office that warm early summer day, the two consummate politicians did what they knew they had to do. They dutifully posed for photographers, arm in arm, smiling broadly, their mutual contempt nicely concealed. (The papers would say the two men had “buried the hatchet,” a suggestion that made Truman laugh.)

  To much applause, Truman was escorted into the Senate chamber by Lyndon Johnson and Senate Majority Leader William Knowland. Truman immediately walked over to Robert Taft, the Ohio Republican who was one of Truman’s fiercest opponents in the Senate. Taft was gravely ill, his body riddled with cancer. Thin and pale, he struggled to his feet with the aid of crutches. The two old foes shared a long, warm handshake. Taft, a perennial presidential candidate, turned to a Republican colleague, Andrew F. Schoeppel of Kansas, and said, “Harry and I have always had the viewpoint that he’d make the best Democratic candidate and I’d make the best Republican candidate for the reason that we each think that the other would be easiest to defeat.” A month later, Taft was dead.

  Truman then walked over to his old desk in the back ro
w. (At the time it was assigned to Hubert Humphrey, one of the three Democratic senators absent that day.) Truman smiled broadly as the applause continued. When it finally subsided, Nixon invited Truman to say a few words.

  “I think I have told you before,” Truman said, “that the happiest ten years of my life were spent on the floor of the Senate. I used to sit in this seat; and I had a seat here for the simple reason that, when the going became too rough, there was always a way to get out.” Truman motioned toward a nearby door. The chamber erupted in laughter.

  “This body,” he continued, “of course, has great responsibilities. Its members do not need to be told that by a former senator. But it is up to this body to keep the peace of the world. My ambition has always been to see peace in the world for all nations; and if that happens, it means peace and prosperity for our own nation.

  “I have had a most wonderful experience in driving across the country as a chauffeur in an automobile—a privilege which I had not enjoyed for about eight years…. Mrs. Truman watched the speedometer very carefully and we arrived safely.

  “I express sincere appreciation for the courtesy which this body has extended to me. I have enjoyed it very much.”

  Applause filled the chamber again. Though brief, Truman’s remarks were historic: he was the first ex-president to address the Senate since Andrew Johnson in 1875. (Johnson, the only former president elected to the Senate, served less than five months before dying.)