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

by Matthew Algeo

  Residents of the Leland are served meals in what used to be the hotel’s restaurant. I called the home to see if it would be possible for me to have lunch there, as Harry and Bess had. “Of course you can,” said the cheerful manager, Judy Sherrow. All she asked in return was that I give a brief presentation on the Trumans’ trip to the home’s residents. In other words, I was to be an “activity.” It struck me as a perfectly reasonable exchange, and I agreed at once.

  Lunch was served at eleven-thirty in the morning. (It seems the elderly, in Richmond, Indiana, at least, like to take their meals early. At the Leland, dinner is served at four-thirty.) I sat at a small table with Judy and one of the home’s residents, a woman recovering from a recent fall and having difficulty mastering the walker she was now forced to use.

  “I’m not used to needing help!” she said.

  “It’s just part of the process of getting old,” said Judy reassuringly. She spoke in a soothing tone perfectly suited to her position.

  “Well, I don’t like it,” the woman said.

  Then, out of the blue, the woman insisted Judy guess her age. Judy was hesitant, but the woman prodded her. “Seventy-seven,” Judy proffered.

  “No,” said the woman, now suddenly quite pleased. “Eighty-seven!”

  Over grilled ham and cheese sandwiches and chicken soup, Judy told me about the Leland. Built on the site of an old casket factory in 1928, it was widely regarded as the finest hotel in all of Indiana when it opened. But it couldn’t compete with the motels that sprouted on the outskirts of town in the 1960s and ‘70s. It closed in 1984, reopened in 1986, closed again in 1990, reopened again in 1993, and finally closed for good in 2000. It was reborn as a retirement home in 2001, which is when Judy was hired. I asked her what she’d done before that. She smiled. “I ran a nursery school for twenty-eight years,” she said. “The jobs really aren’t that different. You just need to meet their needs and try to make them happy.”

  After lunch I gave my presentation in the Leland’s “living room,” which used to be the hotel’s lobby. It was attended by seven women—all quite elderly, naturally. They were scattered about on sofas and easy chairs. Two of them dozed intermittently throughout the talk. But I thought I did a pretty good job, and when I concluded, I was rewarded with a round of applause, which, besides making me feel good, had the added benefit of awakening the two drowsy attendees.

  Around two o’clock the Trumans left Richmond. That night, they would do what countless other road trippers have done: they would crash with friends.

  14

  Indianapolis, Indiana,

  July 7–8, 1953

  Around four o’clock in the afternoon of Tuesday, July 7, Harry and Bess pulled into the driveway behind the McKinney home on North Meridian Street in Indianapolis. At six—after Harry’s nap, of course—the McKinneys hosted a reception for the former president and first lady in their backyard. The weather was lovely. The heat that had seemed to follow the Trumans ever since they left Independence had finally abated. The temperature was in the seventies.

  About a hundred people attended the party, which the Indianapolis Times called “one of the season’s most exclusive and loveliest.” It was a swanky affair. Harry wore a white Palm Beach suit, a gray and white silk tie, and spotless white shoes. Bess wore a pale gray dress. “Everybody at the party looks so good,” cracked one attendee, “we look like a bunch of Republicans.” But it wasn’t strictly a political event. Several prominent Indianapolis Republicans were on hand, including the city’s thirty-seven-year-old mayor, Alex Clark.

  Nineteen-year-old Claire McKinney, the McKinneys’ eldest daughter, was at the party that evening, dressed in a “gay summer frock,” according to the next day’s Indianapolis Times. She remembered one of the guests turning to Mayor Clark in the receiving line and asking, a bit accusatorily, “What are you doing here?” Truman overheard the remark and grabbed the mayor’s hand, saying, “It’d be a hell of a country, wouldn’t it, Mayor, if there wasn’t a two-party system?” “Then he talked to him for a long time,” Claire said. “Harry Truman didn’t choose his friends by their party affiliation.”

  Harry ordered a Wild Turkey (allegedly watered down) from the makeshift bar that was set up in the driveway. Bess had a ginger ale. The guests broke into two groups, the men surrounding Harry, the women encircling Bess. The mood was convivial. When someone told Harry he’d done a good job raising Margaret, Harry held his hand up. When it comes to raising daughters, he said, “The important thing is the mother…. It doesn’t matter about the father.” A local Democratic Party official named Harry Gasper introduced himself to Truman, noting that they shared the same first name. “Only,” Gasper said, “my mother wanted me to be president and I never got farther than a ward chairman.”

  “I’ll tell you something,” the other Harry replied. “My mother didn’t care what I became.”

  At Bess’s circle, one of the guests asked her for the secret to a happy marriage. “Well,” she answered, “I just let him alone.” She said she and Harry were enjoying their cross-country trip immensely, but they were looking forward to going home. “There are just two of us and we sort of rattle around the old house.” When she noticed the ice in her ginger ale had melted, Bess announced, “We need more ice,” and led the pack of women to the bar. When one couple came to say good-bye to her, the wife said, “When we come through Missouri we’re going to drive by your house.”

  “Don’t drive by,” said Bess. “Come in.”

  After the hour-long reception, the Trumans, the McKinneys, and two other couples went inside for dinner. Claire McKinney, meanwhile, went out dancing with friends. Later that night, she bumped into Alex Clark, the Indianapolis mayor, at a nightclub. “You need to meet my little brother,” the mayor told her. His name was Jim. He had just returned from Korea. Claire said it would be fine if Jim gave her a call sometime.

  When Claire returned home around midnight, the former president of the United States was playing the piano, quite loudly, in her living room, much to the amusement of the rest of the dinner party. “They were all singing and laughing and having the best time,” says Claire. “It was—there couldn’t be anything more normal.” Claire went upstairs and tried to get some sleep while Harry Truman banged away on the piano downstairs.

  The Trumans slept in Frank and Margaret McKinneys’ bedroom that night. Frank slept on a couch in his study. Margaret slept in Claire’s room. The McKinneys’ bedroom was en suite, so the rest of the household was spared the sight of a slightly tipsy Harry Truman padding around the second floor in his pajamas in the middle of the night, searching for the bathroom.

  At 7:20 the next morning, Harry emerged from the McKinney home for his morning constitutional. Accompanied by Frank McKinney and the Indianapolis News’s political reporter, Ed Ziegner, Harry covered about twelve blocks in the neighborhood around the McKinney home. He slowed his usual 120-step-a-minute pace, he said, “to be considerate of the others.” Along the way Truman and his companions discussed the Civil War, World War I, the trials and tribulations of other ex-presidents, and his former associates in Washington. Returning to the McKinney home after thirty minutes, Harry turned to his host and said, “Frank, this will cost you a big breakfast.” But McKinney was in no shape to cook. He was winded. “It was the first walk I’ve taken in I don’t know how long,” he said. “I didn’t even know what streets had sidewalks.”

  After breakfast Truman held a press conference in the McKinneys’ living room. He said the Democrats lost in 1952 because the “people were prosperous, fat, and easygoing.” “They thought maybe they would like a change,” he said. “They let glamour and demagoguery get the best of them.”

  Asked if he was “optimistic about the future of this country,” he said, “I’m always optimistic about this great country of ours. I’ve always said I wish I could see the next 50 years—it will be the greatest period in the history of the world.” Asked if he didn’t “expect to see most of it,” T
ruman laughed. “Well, I’m in pretty good health now. But according to the Bible after next year I’ll be living on borrowed time.”

  At one point the press conference was interrupted when the McKinneys’ two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Kathy, came bounding into the living room. Her mother set her on the couch next to Truman, but Kathy would have none of it. She jumped off the couch and began screaming “Mommy!”

  “Smart young lady,” observed Truman.

  But her mother put her back on the couch, and this time Kathy took to the grinning stranger in the crisp white suit. The press conference continued with Harry bouncing Kathy on his knee.

  He reiterated that he would not accept any position on the board of directors of any organization, out of respect for the presidency. He said he would spend the rest of the year working on his memoirs, or his “statement of fact,” as he referred to it.

  He said he’d had “a very pleasant visit” in Indianapolis but was eager to return to Independence, “the finest place in the world to live.” (“You people ought to think that about Indiana,” he added, good politician that he was.) He declined to say which route he planned to take home. He only said he hoped to make it back before the end of the day. But Independence was nearly five hundred miles away. He needed to leave soon. He excused himself and went upstairs to finish packing.

  At eleven o’clock, the big black Chrysler swung out of the McKinneys’ driveway and onto 49th Street. The Trumans waved good-bye and headed home.

  A few weeks later, Claire McKinney got a call from Jim Clark, the mayor’s brother. They went out on a date and, according to Claire, they didn’t have a very good time. “But,” Claire said, “after I graduated from college a couple years later we were thrown together again by his brother and actually had a very good time. But it never would have happened if it hadn’t been for that reception for Harry Truman!” Claire and Jim were married in 1957. Harry and Bess sent them a silver tray as a wedding present. They still have it.

  There was just one tiny problem with Claire’s new husband: he was a Republican. And when he ran for a seat in the state legislature in the early 1960s, Claire joined him. “I jumped ship,” Claire told me. “I had to.” She was nervous about telling her father, so she made an appointment to see him in his downtown office. “I thought I’d better be proper about this,” Claire said. “I said, ‘I just wanted to let you know that I’m changing my registration.’ He said, ‘You damn well better!’ He and my husband were very good friends and he was very proud to vote for him.” In 1962, Jim Clark was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives.

  Claire and Jim have four children. The eldest, J. Murray Clark, is the chairman of the Indiana Republican Party.

  The McKinneys sold their home on North Meridian Street in 1954, but the current owner was kind enough to allow Claire and me to take a look around. Claire still lives in Indianapolis and passes the house often, but she hadn’t been inside it in more than fifty years. As she surveyed the first floor, she made the observation that everybody seems to make upon returning to a childhood home after a long absence. “It feels small,” she said softly. “Isn’t that funny?”

  I felt it would have been a tad presumptuous of me to ask the owner of the house if Claire and I could stay for dinner, but Claire suggested an appealing alternative. She invited me to join her and Jim for dinner at their house. She would invite Murray and his wife, Janet, too. And there was a guest room in the basement, so I could even spend the night. It was a generous offer and one that I did not hesitate to accept.

  I arrived at Claire and Jim’s house at five-thirty. Claire and I chatted about the weather—a series of violent storms had recently passed through Indianapolis—while Jim prepared a round of cocktails (vodka and Fresca).

  A few minutes later Murray and Janet arrived. Murray looked like a politician—and I mean that in a good way. His appropriately gray hair was perfectly coiffed, his tan suit still crisp even at the end of a long day at the office. His attractive blond wife, Janet, was a pediatric dentist. We all took seats in the living room. Murray seemed a little wary of me at first. Who, after all, was this stranger who kept pestering his mother? But, abetted by a Coors Light or two, he lightened up. He talked about the Eric Clapton concert he and Janet had gone to the previous Friday. “He’s my all-time favorite,” Murray said. “He played ‘Layla'—the greatest rock ‘n’ roll song ever written.” The only bummer was that the concert ended early because of the storms.

  Murray is a partner in an Indianapolis law firm, where he specializes in real estate law. He served eleven years in the Indiana Senate and ran for lieutenant governor in 2000 (he lost). In 2004 he was the chairman of Mitch Daniels’s gubernatorial campaign (Daniels won). Since then he’s been chairman of the state Republican Party.

  I asked Murray how it came to be that he, the grandson of the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, came to be the head of the GOP in Indiana. He told me he’d been interested in politics since he was a child. It was practically the family business, after all. At nine years old he worked on his Uncle Alex’s second mayoral campaign, and at sixteen he worked on Richard Lugar’s first senatorial campaign (losing efforts, both). He was close to his grandfather, he said, but he never even considered being a Democrat. “I strongly believe, however, he would truly be proud that I am state chair,” Murray said. “Even if it is the GOP.”

  Murray had recently chaired the state convention (it was held the same weekend as the Clapton concert). At the convention, delegates to the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul were chosen. Murray had had to cope with an insurgent faction of Republicans loyal to the irrepressible presidential candidate Ron Paul. The “Paulites” had tried to elect “stealth delegates” who would vote for Paul instead of John McCain at the national convention. “They’re true believers,” Murray sighed. He sounded more than a little exasperated with that faction of the party. It reminded me of how his grandfather had had to keep the fractured Democrats together at the 1952 national convention. It seems that being a party leader, Republican or Democratic, is less about politics than peacekeeping—or herding cats.

  It was time for dinner. Claire asked if we would like red wine or white. The consensus was that both bottles should be opened. We enjoyed a lovely meal of chicken cordon bleu and roasted vegetables, with Apple Brown Betty and vanilla gelato for dessert. Throughout dinner I told Truman stories at an ever-increasing volume while my companions pretended not to be bored. We also talked about how politics has changed since 1953, how it seems to have become more personal and less personable.

  “Politics was different then,” Claire said. “It wasn’t as mean. Politics today is mean. People respected each other. I remember one night my father came home for dinner and he said, ‘A terrible thing happened in our town today. A man who was running for president of the United States came to our town to talk today—and people threw eggs at him.’ It was Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate. My father said, ‘Respect is owed to anybody who is running for this office.’ It was respect. It wasn’t personal.”

  It was a wonderful evening. I had been treated like a king—or, better yet, an ex-president. I slept like a baby in Claire’s guest room that night, which is probably how Harry slept the night he stayed with Claire’s parents all those years before.

  Harry Truman and Frank McKinney remained close friends for the rest of their lives. And, like Harry, Frank remained active in Democratic Party politics. Over the years he was offered a number of prominent political positions, including a seat on the Securities and Exchange Commission, but he declined them all to stay in Indianapolis. In 1968, at Truman’s urging, President Johnson appointed McKinney ambassador to Spain. It was a challenging assignment. At the time the United States was negotiating with the Franco regime to keep its military bases in Spain. The Senate confirmed McKinney’s appointment, but he was too ill to take the post. He died of cancer in 1974. He was sixty-nine.

  15

  St. Lou
is, Missouri,

  July 8, 1953

  Instead of backtracking along Highway 36 through Decatur and Hannibal, the Trumans took Highway 40 home from Indianapolis. That took them on a more southerly route through Illinois and into St. Louis. Maybe they chose the different route to throw the press off their trail. If so, it worked. Harry and Bess went “missing” again that afternoon. After they left the McKinneys, there were no more reported sightings of the couple until they stopped for dinner in St. Louis at four o’clock, about five hours later.

  It was on an earlier trip to St. Louis that the single most enduring image of Harry Truman was captured. On the afternoon of Thursday, November 4, 1948, less than forty-eight hours after his stunning upset in the presidential election, Truman was headed back to Washington on the Ferdinand Magellan when the train stopped briefly at Union Station in St. Louis. A crowd of several thousand turned out to greet the triumphant candidate. Among those who met Truman at the station that afternoon was his friend Charles Arthur Anderson, a World War I veteran and former Democratic congressman from Missouri. Somehow Anderson had obtained a copy of the early edition of the previous day’s Chicago Tribune. After Truman gave a short speech from the rear platform of the train, Anderson handed him the paper. Beaming, the newly elected president turned toward the crowd and held the paper aloft with both hands for all to see its famously erroneous headline: “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” A roar went up. “That’s one for the books,” said Truman laughing. At least three photographers standing shoulder to shoulder directly beneath the president captured the moment: Frank Cancellare of United Press, Pierce Hangge of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and Byron Rollins of the Associated Press. Their photographs, so identical as to be nearly indistinguishable, would become iconic, a timeless commentary on the fallibility of polls, the virtues of perseverance, and the trustworthiness of the press.