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

by Matthew Algeo

  Now, less than five years later, Harry had returned to St. Louis under considerably more modest circumstances. For dinner, he and Bess went to Schneithorst’s, a popular German restaurant at Lambert Field—the St. Louis airport. Yes, once upon a time airports were renowned for their fine dining. Air travel, after all, was glamorous and sophisticated. At the dawn of the jet age, people dressed up to fly, and the airport was a place for the beautiful and the rich, not metal detectors. (The FAA didn’t even require airlines to search passengers and baggage until 1973, after the D. B. Cooper hijacking.) Airports were tourist attractions, too. Thousands came to Lambert Field every month simply to stare in slack-jawed amazement at such modern marvels as the enormous four-engine Douglas DC-6s and Lockheed Constellations.

  Schneithorst’s occupied a prized corner of Lambert Field’s terminal, a rectangular two-story brick building that resembled a high school. The restaurant looked out on the runway, so diners could enjoy the spectacle of takeoffs and landings with their Wiener schnitzel à la Holstein and potato pancakes. It was owned by Arthur Schneithorst, who’d held the airport concession since 1940. (As part of the deal, Schneithorst also provided in-flight meals for the airlines based in St. Louis.) He’d seen the restaurant through some lean years during the war, but now business was booming, and Schneithorst’s had become a St. Louis favorite.

  How Harry Truman ended up at Schneithorst’s is anybody’s guess. Maybe it was recommended to him when he stopped for gas. Harry tended to regard the recommendations of service station attendants most highly. In any event, as had happened so often on their trip, Harry and Bess weren’t even recognized when they entered the restaurant. But a buzz soon filled the room, and all eyes turned from the runway to the middle-aged couple seated at a table in waitress Virginia Sullins’s section. They ordered veal cutlets.

  One bold customer walked up to them to confirm their identities. Harry “admitted the charge,” as he liked to say, and thereafter their meal was constantly interrupted. This had become their usual dining experience. But if they were perturbed, they never showed it. They “laughed and joked with other less famed customers,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. They even stayed for dessert, though Mrs. Sullins was by that point so flustered that she had difficulty remembering their order: chocolate ice cream for Harry, more fruit (cantaloupe) for Bess.

  The brick terminal at Lambert Field was replaced in 1956 with a striking new building designed by the St. Louis architectural firm of Hellmuth, Yamasaki, and Leinweber. (George Hellmuth would later form HOK, the firm that designed the Abraham Lincoln Museum as well as many ballparks. Minoru Yamasaki went on to design the World Trade Center.) With its vaulted ceilings and glass walls, the terminal suggests a sense of flight. It was one of the firm’s first big projects, and it was an unqualified success. The Lambert Field terminal has been cited as an architectural masterpiece. (Another of the firm’s early projects in St. Louis, the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project, was less well received. It was demolished in 1973.)

  Arthur Schneithorst was not awarded the restaurant concession in the new terminal. Undeterred, he built a new, half-million-dollar German restaurant at the intersection of Clayton Road and Lindbergh Boulevard in western St. Louis County. He called it the Hofamberg Inn. St. Louis had never seen anything like it. The sprawling building looked like something straight out of Bavaria, with a clock tower, turrets, and a red-tiled roof. It had three separate dining rooms and two bars, one of which was paneled in walnut and pigskin, with brass figures in bas-relief on the walls. And that was just the first floor. Upstairs were nine banquet rooms. The Hofamberg Inn became a St. Louis institution, but when Arthur’s grandson Jim Schneithorst Jr. took over the business in 2002, the first thing he did was tear the place down. He really didn’t have much choice. The building had become too expensive to maintain, and the demand for schnitzel just wasn’t what it used to be. A “mixed-use development” was built in its place. It includes a very nice restaurant, but, as St. Louisans will tell you, it’s just not the same.

  The restaurant concession at Lambert Field is now held by HSMHost, a Maryland-based company that operates restaurants in airports and highway rest stops—sorry, “travel venues”—all over the world. Based on my extensive research, which consisted of asking somebody in the airport’s management office, a restaurant called the Rib Café is roughly where Schneithorst’s used to be. The day I visited happened to be Valentine’s Day, and, by a happy coincidence, Allyson was traveling with me. We planned to return to the airport that night and enjoy a romantic dinner at the Rib Café. Reservations, we assumed, would not be necessary.

  If you’ve ever wondered what kind of restaurant would be closed on Valentine’s night, it would be the kind in the St. Louis airport. As Allyson and I discovered when we showed up for dinner at eight, the Rib Café closes at 6:30 P.M. every day. Even Valentine’s Day. How this fits into HSMHost’s master plan, I don’t know.

  Disappointed, we took the shuttle back to our hotel, where we had a completely forgettable dining experience.

  The next day we returned to the Rib Café—for lunch. And, as airport restaurants go, it wasn’t half bad. It overlooks the runway, just like Schneithorst’s did, so we could watch planes take off and land while we dined. We ordered ribs, naturally, and they were pretty good. We also enjoyed a tangy coleslaw. The service was efficient. All in all, it was a lovely meal—except for the dead bird on the ledge just outside our window. It lay on its back, in the mid-to late stages of decomposition.

  After dinner at Schneithorst’s, Harry and Bess signed a few autographs, then walked out to their car. Harry asked the parking lot attendant for directions back to Highway 40. (Highway 40 and Interstate 64 are now the same road in St. Louis, but the city’s residents—much to their credit— still refer to it as “40,” not “64.”)

  Harry and Bess took 40 all the way back to Independence.

  They drove straight into the setting sun.

  Epilogue

  The Trumans reached 219 Delaware Street at 9:00 P.M. on Wednesday, July 8. They’d been gone nineteen days. They’d driven some twenty-five hundred miles. Bess’s brothers George and Frank, who lived around the corner, helped them unpack. “It was a wonderful trip,” Bess told the Independence Examiner. Harry skipped his walk the next morning and slept in. He didn’t leave for work until around ten. On the way in, he dropped off his suits at the cleaners. In one of his jacket pockets he discovered the key to his room at the Waldorf. He mailed it back.

  Harry and Bess would never take another long car trip. Harry was forced to admit that it was virtually impossible for them to travel incognito anymore. He lamented the loss of anonymity in a letter to his old friend Vic Householder, who had invited Harry to visit him in Arizona. “I’d give most anything to pay a visit to Arizona,” Harry wrote. “But Vic I’m a nuisance to my friends. I can’t seem to get from under that awful glare that shines on the White House…. So, Vic, we’ve decided that until the glamour wears off we’ll only do the official things we have to.”

  But as Harry discovered, the glamour of the presidency never wears off. He and Bess did continue to travel, but the trips were choreographed. In 1956 they went to Europe, accompanied by Stanley Woodward, Harry’s former chief of protocol, and Woodward’s wife, Sara. Harry had been to Europe twice before, as an officer in World War I and to confer with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam, but it was Bess’s first trip overseas. They toured Paris, Rome, and London, meeting with dignitaries including Churchill and Pope Pius XII. On June 20, 1956—exactly three years after he and Bess had driven from Decatur to Wheeling, stopping at the McKinneys’ house for lunch—“Harricum” Truman was awarded an honorary degree at Oxford. “Never, never in my life,” he said, “did I ever think I’d be a Yank at Oxford.” “Give ‘em hell, Harricum!” the students shouted.

  Harry, of course, never ran for office again, but he remained active and vocal—some would say too vocal—in the Democratic Party for the rest of his life. He
never really stopped being a politician (an honorable profession in his estimation), but he grew less politic. He caused a minor flap in the 1960 presidential campaign when he said anybody who voted for his bitter enemy Richard Nixon “ought to go to hell.” John Kennedy was asked about the comment in one of his famous televised debates with Nixon. “Well,” he said, “I must say that Mr. Truman has his methods of expressing things…. I really don’t think there’s anything I can say to President Truman that’s going to cause him at the age of seventy-six to change his particular speaking manner. Maybe Mrs. Truman can, but I don’t think I can.” (Nixon, whom the Watergate tapes would reveal to be spectacularly profane, responded with his usual sanctimony: “I can only say that I am very proud that President Eisenhower restored dignity and decency and, frankly, good language to the conduct of the presidency of the United States.”)

  The first volume of Truman’s memoirs, Year of Decisions, was published in 1955. The second, Years of Trial and Hope, came out the following year. Sales were strong, but the reviews were tepid. His army of ghostwriters—more than a dozen, by some estimates—had watered down the prose, rendering it a bland imitation of the pugnacious and opinionated president that America had come to know. Harry knew it, too. Across one page of an early draft he scribbled, “Good God, what crap!” (A third book, Mr. Citizen, which chronicled his life after the White House, better represented the man.)

  In 1955 Harry traded in his 1953 Chrysler New Yorker—for the 1955 model. (If you happen to see the ‘53, please let me know.) It was in the new Chrysler that Harry chauffeured Margaret to Trinity Episcopal Church in Independence on April 21, 1956, for her marriage to Clifton Daniel. It was the same church in which Harry and Bess had been married thirty-seven years earlier. Margaret had met Clifton in New York. He was an editor at the Times. “Margie has put one over on me and got herself engaged to a news man!” Harry wrote his old friend Dean Acheson. But, he hastened to add, “He strikes me as a very nice fellow and if Margaret wants him I’ll be satisfied.” Margaret and Clifton would bless Harry and Bess with four grandsons, on whom they doted relentlessly.

  The Harry S. Truman Library was dedicated on July 6, 1957. It wasn’t built on the Truman family farm as Harry had hoped. His brother and sister had vetoed that idea. The land was too valuable. “Ain’t no use wastin’ good farmland on any old dang library,” said his brother Vivian. So instead the library was built on thirteen acres donated by the city of Independence, just a mile down the road from the Truman home on Delaware Street.

  Sitting next to Truman on the dais at the library’s dedication was Herbert Hoover. The only two living ex-presidents had reconciled in 1955, when Harry invited Hoover to attend a fundraising dinner for the library in San Francisco. Hoover, who was raising funds for his own library in West Branch, Iowa, accepted the invitation. “I have a fellow feeling,” he wrote Truman, “for I have one of those burdens of my own.” Thereafter, Truman and Hoover corresponded regularly, and their mutual admiration, grudging at first, blossomed into genuine friendship. When Harry invited him to attend the library’s dedication, Hoover replied, “One of the important jobs of our very exclusive Trade Union is preserving libraries.” Harry returned the favor when he attended the dedication of Hoover’s library in 1962. “I feel sure that I am one of his closest friends and that’s the reason I am here,” Harry told the crowd.

  Later that year, Hoover wrote Harry to thank him for sending him a copy of Truman Speaks, a compilation of lectures Harry had delivered at Columbia University. “This is an occasion when I should like to add something more,” Hoover wrote after the obligatory thank you, “because yours has been a friendship which has reached deeper into my life than you know…. When you came to the White House within a month you opened the door to me to the only profession I knew, public service, and you undid some disgraceful action that had been taken in the prior years. For all of this and your friendship, I am deeply grateful.” Coming from one as reserved as Hoover, it was an extraordinary letter, and it moved Truman deeply. He had it framed, and he displayed it in his office at the library.

  Like a marble statue suddenly come to life, Truman delighted in surprising visitors to the library, especially schoolchildren, with whom he would hold impromptu question-and-answer sessions—with Harry asking as many questions of the children as they asked of him. He always pointed out that one of them could be president one day—after all, he had never expected to be president himself. Sometimes he would play the piano for them, too.

  Truman kept an office at the library, which finally freed him of the financial burden of renting one in downtown Kansas City. However, other expenses, including postage, were still his responsibility, and his finances continued to trouble him. In January 1958, Truman and his brother and sister sold off the family farm in Grandview. It broke Harry’s heart, but he had no choice. If the farm hadn’t been sold, he wrote, “I would practically be on relief.” The land was purchased by a developer who turned it into a shopping center called Truman Corners. Only the family’s farmhouse was preserved. Today it sits within spitting distance of a McDonald’s, a Sam’s Club, an Applebee’s, and an IHOP.

  Harry and Bess on the porch of their house in Independence on Valentine’s Day 1960. When a friend once offered to arrange a private screening of the movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Harry declined. “Real gentlemen,” he said, “prefer gray hair.”

  Ever more openly, Harry continued to lobby his friends in Congress for financial assistance. To his close friend House Speaker Sam Rayburn he bluntly confessed to needing assistance “to keep ahead of the hounds.” In the summer of 1958, Rayburn, working with Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, finally got a presidential pension bill through Congress. House Majority Leader John McCormack said an outgoing president should not be expected to “engage in any business or occupation which would demean the office he once held.” Dwight Eisenhower, perhaps mindful of his own impending retirement, signed the Former Presidents Act into law on August 25. “The world’s richest nation has finally made sure that never again will an ex-president have to live off the charity of relatives,” began the UPI report on the new law, which entitled ex-presidents to “a monetary allowance” of twenty-five thousand dollars, as well as fifty thousand dollars for office expenses and unlimited franking privileges. (Since it is not a contributory pension, the “allowance” is taxed as if it were a salary.)

  At long last, Harry Truman was financially secure.

  Herbert Hoover, of course, didn’t need the money. He hadn’t even taken a salary as president. But he accepted the pension anyway, to spare his friend Harry any embarrassment.

  On November 22, 1963, Truman was having lunch at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City when he was told that President Kennedy had been shot. In the car on his way home he heard on the radio that Kennedy had died.

  Harry flew to Washington to attend Kennedy’s funeral. Eisenhower was there too, and the two old adversaries ended up sharing the same limousine to the graveside service at Arlington National Cemetery. Margaret Truman Daniel and Mamie Eisenhower rode with them. (Bess wasn’t feeling well, so she stayed home.) They discussed whether Kennedy’s assassination was the work of a conspiracy or a lone gunman. They agreed it was most likely the latter.

  After the service, Margaret invited the Eisenhowers to join her and her father for lunch at the Blair House, where they were staying. Ike and Mamie accepted the invitation. Sandwiches were served, along with coffee and, perhaps, something stronger. For an hour, Harry and Ike chatted amiably, reminiscing about old battles, political and otherwise.

  “I thought it would never end,” recalled Admiral Robert Dennison, a White House aide who was also there, “but it was really heartwarming … you’d think there had never been any differences between them…. It was really wonderful.”

  When it was time for the Eisenhowers to go, Harry and Margaret walked them to their car. The two former presidents chatted some more. Then they shook hands, “a long, lingering, silen
t handshake,” according to one account. Margaret kissed Ike on the cheek. Mamie kissed Harry.

  Harry and Ike had made peace, though they would never see each other again.

  In 1965, in the wake of the assassination, Congress passed a law authorizing the Secret Service to protect former presidents and their wives. This did not please the Trumans. When an agent showed up at their house and told Harry that he no longer had a need for Mike Westwood, the Independence cop who’d been his part-time bodyguard for twelve years, Harry told the agent, “Well, I no longer have a need for you, so get out of here.” Bess was equally opposed to the return of the Secret Service. “Mother reacted as if they had just told her she was going to have to spend four more years in the White House,” Margaret wrote. “She refused to allow the Secret Service men on the property.” Harry read the new law carefully and discovered a provision allowing him and Bess to refuse the protection. On September 21, he wrote the Secret Service requesting that their detail be “discontinued.” (Ironically, less than three weeks earlier, he had received a letter threatening to have him “rubbed out” to avenge Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

  Then one night, the phone in the hall rang. Bess answered.

  “Bess,” purred a familiar voice, “this is Lyndon.” Perhaps the president mentioned Harry and Bess’s road trip in 1953, and how worried the Secret Service had been even back then. Perhaps he told her how helpful it would be to have the agents around now, how they could run errands or help around the house. And, of course, there was the matter of safety. Whatever he said, Johnson must have been at his persuasive best, for he convinced the stubborn couple to allow the Secret Service back into their lives.

  But, at Harry’s insistence, Mike Westwood stayed.

  Harry and Bess often returned to New York to visit Margaret, Clifton, and the grandchildren. They usually traveled by plane. Harry still took a walk most mornings, accompanied by a pack of reporters, including, now, television crews. But, as the years passed, his pace slowed, the walks grew shorter, and his famously acidulous observations occasionally gave way to simpleminded crotchetiness. Civil rights demonstrators were “busybodies,” antiwar protestors were “silly.”