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

by Matthew Algeo

  As he departed the chamber, again escorted by Johnson and Knowland, an impromptu receiving line formed. Truman moved along the gauntlet, shaking hands. All the senators he greeted warmly—save two. William Jenner, an Indiana Republican, and John Marshall Butler, a Maryland Republican, received handshakes that, the New York Times noted, were “quick and perfunctory.” Both were allies of Joseph McCarthy.

  McCarthy himself was conspicuously—and, some said, prudently—absent.

  His private meetings with lawmakers not only gave Harry a chance to catch up on politics. They also gave him a chance to lobby—discreetly, to be sure—for a pension. The issue was not new. After Ulysses S. Grant’s financial problems came to light in 1880, his friends launched a campaign to raise $250,000 in private contributions for a trust fund, the interest from which would be paid to “the surviving ex-President whose Incumbency is most distant in point of time.” Grant, naturally, would be the first recipient. The campaign ended when Grant indicated he would not accept the pension.

  After he left the White House, Grover Cleveland was asked if the best way to deal with ex-presidents wasn’t to “take them out to a five-acre lot and shoot them.” “Five acres seems needlessly large,” Cleveland replied, “and, in the second place, an ex-president has already suffered enough.”

  In late November 1912, Andrew Carnegie offered to pay future ex-presidents twenty-five thousand dollars a year so they could “spend their latter days free from pecuniary cares in devoting the intimate knowledge they have gained of public affairs to the good of the country.” By limiting the pensions to “future” ex-presidents, Carnegie pointedly snubbed his old trust-busting nemesis Teddy Roosevelt, the only living ex at the time. Roosevelt was too rich to care. “In any event,” he said upon learning of Carnegie’s offer, “[my] interest isn’t in pensions for ex-Presidents, but in pensions for the small man who doesn’t have a chance to save, and who, when he becomes superannuated, faces the direst poverty.” The sole immediate beneficiary of Carnegie’s offer would have been his good friend William Howard Taft, who had recently lost his bid for a second term (largely because Roosevelt had run as a third-party candidate). Taft had hinted at his upcoming need in a speech shortly after the election. “I consider that the President of the United States is well paid,” he said, “… unless it is the policy of Congress to enable him in his four years to save enough money to live in adequate dignity and comfort thereafter….”

  Carnegie’s proposal was widely condemned as “undemocratic.” “The idea of ex-Presidents being dependent on private bounty is distasteful to many of Mr. Taft’s associates and friends,” the New York Times reported. Taft was forced to disavow the offer, and Carnegie withdrew it. (Taft, as it happened, found a good post-presidential job in 1921, when Warren Harding appointed him chief justice.)

  Members of Congress, meanwhile, exhibited an aversion to presidential pensions that bordered on hostility. (They were more generous with presidential widows. At least twelve had been allocated pensions, usually around five thousand dollars a year. They were also more generous with themselves. A congressional pension plan was begun in 1946—too late for Harry, though.)

  In 1912, shortly after Carnegie made his pension offer, Albert S. Burleson, a Democratic congressman from Texas, proposed that ex-presidents be made permanent, nonvoting members of the House of Representatives at an annual salary of $17,500. The proposal went nowhere.

  In 1948 none other than Senator Robert Taft, son of William, proposed a “substantial” pension—perhaps twenty-five thousand dollars a year—which would allow former presidents “to live in a dignified manner.” He also said exes should be made nonvoting members of the Senate. But, again, Congress did nothing.

  In an editorial published shortly before Truman left office, the New York Times spoke out in favor of pensions for ex-presidents. “A president nowadays is likely to be a worn-out man when he lays down his office,” the paper wrote. “He shouldn’t have to embark on making a living even in a comfortable and dignified way.”

  To Harry Truman, a pension was a matter of principle. Members of Congress got pensions. So did federal judges, and generals and admirals. Yet he got nothing—and he had been commander in chief for nearly eight years! “If you were a rich man before becoming President you went home to your estates,” he wrote in September 1953, “[and] if your means were modest you did the best you could to earn a living…. You were just a private citizen. Ideally, this fits in with our notions of the equality of man. Practically, though, it presents a few problems.”

  Even if he didn’t get a pension, Truman argued, the government should at least help him pay his expenses. Truman estimated the cost of maintaining his office in Kansas City at more than thirty-six hundred dollars a month. The government, he believed, should pick up 70 percent of that cost, the remainder being “what I would ordinarily have been out on my own hook if I hadn’t tried to meet the responsibilities of being a former President.”

  Still, Congress wouldn’t budge.

  In contrast to the bitter denunciations he had sometimes suffered in the editorial pages during his presidency, the newspaper coverage of Truman’s return to Washington was mostly fawning.

  A cartoon on the front page of the Washington Star depicted Harry as a tourist, a travel guide in his back pocket and camera in hand, standing on the sidewalk, peering at the White House through the iron gate. It greatly amused Truman, who once described the White House as a “prison.” “I’d much rather be on the outside looking in than on the inside looking out,” he joked.

  “The friendly quality that was so much a part of the Truman family during their years in Senate life and later in the White House was still with them during their recent visit here,” said an editorial in the Star (which had endorsed Dewey in 1948). “It was good to have them back. They looked fine, and it’s nice to know they’re happy and enjoying life. One hopes that they’ll make a habit of dropping into town from time to time. Old friends are always welcome.”

  Not everybody was so welcoming. Harry’s old enemies on the right couldn’t abide his carefree return to Washington. “Harry S. can stroll blithely around the nation’s capital, without a care in the world, secretly hugging himself with glee,” wrote the newspaper columnist George Dixon, who noted that Truman had run up a budget deficit of better than six billion dollars in the final year of his administration. “He did the dancing, but Dwight D. has to pay the piper.”

  But Harry didn’t give a damn what George Dixon or any of his ilk thought. He had the time of his life on his first trip back to the capital. “As soon as we arrived in Washington,” Harry wrote, “the calendar seemed to have been turned back a year…. It seemed like a dream to relive such an experience. For one solid week, the illusion of those other days in Washington was maintained perfectly. The suite we stayed in at the Mayflower could have been the White House; many of the visitors were the same. Everything seemed just as it used to be—the taxi drivers shouting hello along the line of my morning walks, the dinners at night with the men and women I had worked with for years, the conferences, the tension, the excitement, the feeling of things happening and going to happen—all the same. I was deeply moved by the spontaneous expression of good will shown me.”

  9

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,

  June 26–27, 1953

  On the afternoon of Friday, June 26, Harry took the train to Philadelphia. He rode in a private railcar loaned to him by the Pennsylvania Railroad, another “favor” that the former president gladly accepted. Bess and Margaret, meanwhile, drove ahead to New York City in the Chrysler. Harry would meet them there after his speech.

  Philadelphia played a pivotal role in Truman’s political career. It was the site of the 1948 Democratic National Convention, where Truman roused languid delegates in a sweltering auditorium with a characteristically pugnacious acceptance speech: “… I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don’t you forget that!” It was the opening sa
lvo of the whistle-stop campaign.

  Five years later, almost to the day, Truman was returning to Philadelphia to deliver the first major speech of his post-presidency.

  At 4:12 P.M. his train pulled into 30th Street Station, where he was greeted by a delegation of city officials as well as a contingent from the Reserve Officers Association. Dressed in a blue summer suit and a Panama hat, the former president looked relaxed and jovial. He was driven to the Warwick Hotel, where he took a nap. Then he was driven several blocks to the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, the site of the Reserve Officers Association’s twenty-seventh annual convention.

  Standing in a receiving line before dinner, Truman, now donning a white dinner jacket and black bow tie, greeted another member of the Reserve Officers Association who, like Truman, was a colonel in the army reserves: J. Strom Thurmond, former governor of South Carolina and erstwhile presidential candidate. Back in 1948, Thurmond had bolted the Democratic Party to protest its civil rights platform. “There’s not enough troops in the army to break down segregation and admit the Negro into our homes, our eating places, our swimming pools, and our theaters,” he declared. Thurmond, who had secretly fathered an illegitimate child with his African American maid twenty-three years earlier, ran for president as the candidate of the States’ Rights Democratic Party (aka the Dixiecrats). In his standard stump speech, Thurmond castigated Truman, whom he described as “mad with the lust for power.” What Truman was proposing, he said, was “a program so full of narcotics that the American people are in danger of being lulled to sleep by it. They have named this program ‘civil rights.'”

  Thurmond carried four Southern states, capturing thirty-nine electoral votes and ending the Democrats’ stranglehold on the region. Two years later, Thurmond returned to the Democratic Party and ran unsuccessfully for the Senate on a decidedly anti-Truman platform. And just the preceding fall, he’d endorsed Eisenhower, not Stevenson. (Thurmond would get elected to the Senate as a Democratic write-in candidate in 1954. He would hold the seat the rest of his life. In 1964 he switched parties and became a Republican.)

  Truman, understandably, didn’t much care for Strom Thurmond, whose disloyalty to the Democratic Party was something that Truman couldn’t stomach. But in the receiving line that night, Harry did the same thing he’d done with Ike on Inauguration Day and Nixon two days earlier. He smiled. He shook Thurmond’s hand. The flashbulbs popped.

  Harry delivers his first major speech as a former president at the Reserve Officers Association convention in Philadelphia, June 26, 1953. “Do not be misled by the desire for lower taxes into cutting corners on our national security,” he warned.

  After dinner, Truman was introduced as “a colonel, U.S. Army, retired, and the former President of the United States.” He received a two-minute standing ovation.

  He stood behind a small lectern that had been placed on the head table. A sign leaning against the front of it read RESERVES ASK ONLY THE RIGHT TO BE READY. The lectern was covered with microphones—the speech would be carried live on radio stations nationwide. Television cameras were there too, and it was dreadfully hot under the klieg lights, though Harry, as usual, never let on. The Bellevue-Stratford’s Grand Ballroom was packed with more than a thousand people, most of the men in uniform, the women in gowns. They sat at round tables covered with white tablecloths, or stood in the balcony overlooking the floor.

  “He stepped to the microphone like a man who can graciously take applause,” wrote Raymond C. Brecht in the Philadelphia Bulletin. “Then he took off the gloves.”

  He began innocuously enough, speaking slowly in that familiar voice, flat, a little high-pitched, the pronunciations still unmistakably Missourian (“entire” he rendered “EN-tire”). He spoke of how he enjoyed reading the morning papers now, “without having to make plans for handling the problems that appear there.”

  “Occasionally,” he said, “the temptation has been very strong to do a little Monday-morning quarterbacking and advise my successor on how he should handle particular situations. But so far I have resisted that temptation, and I think I deserve a little credit for that.”

  He acknowledged that the Republicans had supported him when “the United States took the lead in defending the Republic of Korea against brutal aggression.” He also noted that there had been “more continuity than … change” in American foreign policy since the Republicans took over. “This is as it ought to be.”

  “Unfortunately, however, the elections of last fall have strengthened the irresponsible element in the Republican Party. The grave burden of national leadership has apparently brought no change in the attitude of the reckless and isolationist wing of the Republican Party….

  “Our plans were to build the defense forces we needed as soon as possible, and then to continue these forces at whatever strength was necessary for as long as necessary.”

  His voice was rising, now, the words coming faster.

  “I am sorry to read, however—and I’m sure you are—that a great deal has happened to cut that program down.” He was referring to Eisenhower’s proposed defense cuts.

  He held his hands in the air, as if measuring an imaginary fish. Then he chopped them down to drive home his point.

  “There can be no doctrine more dangerous than the notion that we cannot afford to defend ourselves. And no doctrine quite so foolish, either….

  “The greatest danger period of the ‘cold war’ is not necessarily behind us, as some seem to think. We may be in our greatest danger period now, or it may be ahead of us. Nobody on this side of the Iron Curtain knows what is going on in the minds of the men in the Kremlin….

  “Big talk does not impress the rulers of the Soviet empire…. What impresses them are planes, and divisions, and ships….

  “We must be strongly armed, now and as far ahead as we can see. If the Soviets are genuinely interested in real settlements, we must be able to negotiate from strength. If they are tempted to make war, we must be able to deter them by our strength. And if they should attack, we must be able to beat them back, by strength. No matter what way lies ahead, the essential thing is always strength….

  “I think that those who talk about our defense program being too big may be letting their pocketbooks obscure their judgment. It is only natural to wish that we didn’t have to tax ourselves so much for defense. This is perfectly human. We would all like lower taxes. But I warn you soberly and plainly: Do not be misled by the desire for lower taxes into cutting corners on our national security.

  “Increasing the risk of World War III means increasing the risk of atom bombs on our homes. Think about that hard and think about it often….

  “The world depends upon us,” he said in conclusion. “Let us meet the challenge.” It was ten o’clock. The speech had lasted twenty-four minutes. The ovation it received lasted several more.

  Truman returned to his seat and watched a performance by a choir from Naval Air Station Pensacola. At ten-thirty he returned to the private railcar at 30th Street Station and spent the night on board before proceeding to New York.

  Like Harry, I took a train from Washington to Philadelphia. Unlike Harry, I didn’t ride in a private railcar loaned by the Pennsylvania Railroad (which ceased to exist in 1968). Instead, I was a passenger on the rolling stock of the National Railroad Passenger Corporation. In other words, I took Amtrak. Coach class, of course.

  It was June 26, 2008—the fifty-fifth anniversary of Harry’s speech at the Reserve Officers convention. From 30th Street Station, I took a subway to Center City (as downtown is called in Philadelphia) and walked to the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, the site of Harry’s speech. Opened in 1904, the Bellevue-Stratford is a nineteen-story beaux arts masterpiece. It was Philadelphia’s grandest hotel—until it made history of a most unpleasant kind.

  In the summer of 1976, the American Legion held a convention at the hotel. More than two hundred people who attended it were stricken with a mysterious pneumonia-like malady. More than thirty eventuall
y died of the illness, which was attributed to a bacterium in the hotel’s air-conditioning system. Researchers named the bacterium Legionellosis. The illness it causes has come to be known as Legionnaires’ disease.

  If the best surprise in the lodging business is no surprise, then the worst is probably death. Naturally the outbreak had a deleterious effect on business, and the Bellevue-Stratford was forced to close by the end of that year. Since then it has been bought and sold, opened and closed, and remodeled and renamed many times. In its present incarnation it is known simply as the Bellevue. It is, in essence, an upscale mall. The once-ornate lobby has been subdivided into shops, including a Polo Ralph Lauren and a Tiffany. There’s also a Palm restaurant and the requisite Starbucks. The middle floors have been converted into office space. Only the very top floors still offer accommodations, in the form of a boutique hotel managed by the Hyatt chain.

  One important aspect of the old Bellevue-Stratford has been preserved, however: the Grand Ballroom on the second floor. This is where Harry delivered his speech to the Reserve Officers Association. The ballroom is still rented out for swanky occasions. On the day I visited, however, it was empty. Stacks of chairs sat on the edge of the dance floor. Round folding tables leaned against the wall.

  At the front of the room there was a small stage with an orange backdrop. I walked up to the edge of the stage and turned to face the empty room. I was standing in the very spot where Harry had stood exactly fifty-five years earlier, front and center in his white dinner jacket, under the blazing klieg lights, measuring an imaginary fish, and giving Ike hell.

  The Philadelphia speech was vintage Truman, blunt and forceful with a dash of hyperbole (“atom bombs on our homes”), and it energized Democrats. To the Philadelphia Bulletin the “smiling man from Missouri” looked like he would be a “big cannon” in the 1954 congressional elections.