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

by Matthew Algeo

  He became something of a grumpy old man, yet the nation’s fondness for him only grew, perhaps because he represented a bygone era whose passing, given the tumultuous times, was bemoaned. He was humble, too, in a way his successors were not. Harry had become an elder statesman, though he hated the term. To him, a statesman was just a politician who was dead.

  In 1969 Harry ranked seventh in the Gallup Poll’s annual list of America’s “Most Admired Men.” (For what it’s worth, Nixon ranked first.) More recently, a 2004 poll by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner found that 58 percent of Americans viewed Truman favorably.

  Historians began to reassess Harry too. In 1962, Arthur Schlesinger polled seventy-five historians to rank the presidents. The top five were Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Wilson, and Jefferson. According to the historians, they were the “great” presidents. Harry—whom Walter Trohan had called “one of the most mediocre men ever to inherit power”—ranked ninth. He was one of the “near great” presidents. The results were published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine that July. On file at the Truman Library is a copy of the article with notations made in Harry’s characteristic slashing script. Harry’s top five were Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Wilson, and Jackson. Above the picture of John Adams, whom the historians ranked tenth, he scribbled, “Should be about 18.” Above the picture of himself he wrote, “Not to be considered.” It was Harry’s belief that a president should be dead “about thirty years” before his administration could be fairly assessed.

  It is delightful to imagine the aging ex-president, pencil in hand, sitting on his porch on a sultry summer Sunday morning in Missouri, correcting the rankings.

  On October 13, 1964, Harry slipped and fell in his second-floor bathroom. His head smashed against the sink, shattering his glasses and cutting his forehead. He fell against the bathtub, fracturing two ribs. The next day he received a telegram from Herbert Hoover:

  Bathtubs are a menace to ex-presidents for as you may recall a bathtub rose up and fractured my vertebrae when I was in Venezuela on your world famine mission in 1946. My warmest sympathy and best wishes for your speedy recovery.

  Those were the last words Herbert Hoover is known to have written. Three days later he collapsed. Massive internal bleeding was the cause. He never regained consciousness and died on October 20. He was ninety. At 31 years and 231 days, Hoover’s is the longest ex-presidency in history. Truman, of course, was unable to attend the funeral. He sent a telegram to Hoover’s two sons. “He was my good friend and I was his,” he wrote.

  Harry was back home in a few days, but he never fully recovered from the fall. His morning walks grew less frequent, and he went into his office at the library less often. He grew thin and frail, his face gaunt behind massive horn-rimmed glasses. The man who had found it impossible to travel incognito in 1953 was now unrecognizable, even to many of his neighbors in Independence.

  In 1968 Richard Nixon, one of the two men in politics he truly hated, was elected president. It was a bitter pill for Harry to swallow. He had wanted Lyndon Johnson to run for reelection, to take his case directly to the people, just as Harry had twenty years before. Instead, Harry felt, LBJ had let the “silly” war protesters drive him from office.

  But when the new president, quite unexpectedly, asked if he could visit the Trumans, Harry could hardly refuse. As Margaret put it, “That special bond which links the residents of the White House prevailed over old animosities.” On March 22, 1969, the Nixons came to Independence. They spent about twenty minutes at the house on Delaware Street. The two men chatted while Bess showed Pat Nixon around the house. Then they went to the library, where Nixon presented Harry with a Steinway piano that had been in the White House when the Trumans lived there. Nixon sat down and played “The Missouri Waltz.” Truman disliked the song, of course, but that didn’t matter. His hearing wasn’t what it used to be. When Nixon finished, Harry turned to Bess and asked her what song he’d played.

  A week later, Dwight Eisenhower died. Truman could not attend the funeral, but his public statement was characteristically both candid and generous. “General Eisenhower and I became political opponents but before that we were comrades in arms, and I will not forget his service to his country and to Western civilization.”

  On June 28, 1969, Harry and Bess celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, quietly as usual. By the end of that year, Harry had stopped going to his library altogether. The morning walks stopped too, as he retreated into 219 Delaware Street.

  On the afternoon of December 5, 1972, Harry left the house for the last time. He was taken by ambulance to Research Hospital in Kansas City to be treated for lung congestion. His condition deteriorated.

  On the day after Christmas, Harry S. Truman died. He was eighty-eight.

  Lyndon Johnson, now the only living ex-president, attended the funeral. He did not look well, and, less than a month later, on January 22, 1973, he died of a heart attack. He was sixty-four. For the first time since the death of Calvin Coolidge forty years earlier, America had no living ex-president. Nixon would rectify that by resigning on August 9, 1974.

  Now alone in the big house on Delaware Street, Bess continued to follow politics and baseball closely. She was honorary chairman of Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton’s 1974 reelection campaign. “She knew every player in the Kansas City Royals starting lineup and had very strong opinions of the plusses and minuses of each one,” marveled Eagleton. Arthritis confined her to a wheelchair, but she was active until a fall and a stroke in the early 1980s.

  The longest-lived first lady in American history, Bess Truman died on October 18, 1982. She was ninety-seven.

  Harry and Bess are buried next to each other in the courtyard of the Truman Library.

  Harry is on the driver’s side.

  Postscript

  On April 4, 2008, in the midst of her bruising campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, New York Senator Hillary Clinton released her and her husband’s tax returns for the previous eight years. The returns showed that the former president and first lady had earned a combined $109 million.

  Harry Truman must have been spinning in his grave.

  The Clintons’ income included thirty million from their bestselling books, and as much as fifteen million from an investment partnership with one of their top campaign fundraisers. Bill Clinton earned more than ten million in speaking fees alone. The former president was paid $650,000 by the investment firm Goldman Sachs for giving just four speeches.

  “We’ve come a long way from Harry Truman,” former Clinton aide Leon Panetta wryly observed. Indeed, being an ex-president has changed a lot since the Secret Service dropped off the Trumans at Union Station in Washington on January 20, 1953. As the Washington Post noted, the Clintons had transformed themselves into a phenomenally successful global brand. Today’s ex-president is a small corporation unto himself, with annual revenues of seven (or more) figures and a sizeable workforce.

  Ironically, the last president to follow Harry Truman’s example of refusing to “commercialize” the presidency in retirement was Richard Nixon. Like Harry, Nixon refused to sit on corporate boards or accept exorbitant speaking fees. His income came primarily from book sales. In 1985, he even gave up his Secret Service detail and hired his own bodyguards. In 1980, the Nixons moved from California into a Manhattan townhouse. The still-brooding former president often took brisk early-morning walks, but there were few shouts of “Hiya, Dick!” Instead his presence was often met with speechless incredulity, as if, one writer said, he had risen from the dead.

  It was Nixon’s successor who turned the ex-presidency into a gold mine. Gerald Ford cashed in on his status as a “former” in a way none of his predecessors ever had. Besides the obligatory book deal, he accepted seats on the boards of more than a dozen corporations, including American Express and 20th Century Fox, receiving lucrative compensation for little work. He also commanded speaking fees of fifteen thousand dollars or more and worked the “mashed potato circuit�
�� relentlessly, becoming the first ex-president since Theodore Roosevelt to earn substantial income in that manner. He even lent his name to a series of presidential commemorative coins. By the early 1980s, Ford was raking in more than a million dollars a year. Nixon accused Ford of “selling the office,” but Ford was unapologetic. “I’m a private citizen now; it’s nobody’s business,” he said. “In effect,” wrote historian and journalist Mark K. Updegrove, “he became the first to make a job—a very lucrative one—out of being a former president.”

  Meanwhile, the “exclusive trade union” continued to grow. When George W. Bush took office in 2001, America had five formers (Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton), tying the record set when Clinton took office in 1993 (Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush) and when Lincoln took office in 1861 (Van Buren, Tyler, Pierce, Fillmore, Buchanan). As with Harry and Herbert, unlikely bonds were formed. Carter and Ford became such close friends that Carter once said they were “almost like brothers” and challenged historians “to find any former presidents who … have formed a closer and more intimate relationship” than he and Ford. The elder Bush and Clinton also formed an unlikely alliance, working together on humanitarian relief efforts around the world. Occasionally, all the formers have joined forces. At the dedication of the Reagan Library in 1991, the sitting president, George H. W. Bush, was photographed standing in front of the library with his four immediate predecessors. It was a historic moment, the first gathering of five presidents. The Associated Press later revealed that Bush and the four formers had cut a deal: A limited number of copies of the photo had been made, no more than fifteen hundred. Each of the five was to sign each of the copies. All agreed to sign no other copies, driving up the price of the photos they’d already signed. One autograph collector estimated the deal would net each man as much as $1.5 million. The presidents insisted the pact was only intended to raise money for their libraries.

  In 1961 Harry was asked to sign a photograph of him standing on the dais with Hoover, Eisenhower, and Nixon at Eisenhower’s first inaugural. The other three men had already signed it, but Harry refused. “I wouldn’t sign a picture with that son-of-a-bitch Nixon in it,” he said by way of explanation. “He called me a traitor.” Then he cocked his fist as if to throw a punch. “This is what I’d like to do to him.”

  All the while, the presidential pension package has continued to grow. Today an ex-president receives an annual pension equivalent to the salary of a cabinet officer—around $190,000. He also gets money to pay for office expenses, staff salaries, travel, and postage. It can amount to more than a million dollars a year. In 2008 the rent on Bill Clinton’s office in Harlem alone was more than $500,000. (Carter’s in Atlanta was $102,000. The elder Bush’s in Houston was $175,000.)

  The total amount of money the federal government spends on its ex-presidents has risen from $160,000 in 1959 to an estimated $2.5 million in 2008. And that’s not counting Secret Service protection, which, in 2000, when four formers were living, cost nearly twenty-six million dollars altogether.

  Harry thought presidents deserved pensions, but probably not that much. Given the earning power of the modern ex-president, it’s doubtful such lucrative pensions are even necessary anymore. Yet, just as it was loath to grant the pensions in the first place, Congress is now loath to take them away. In 1994 President Clinton signed a bill that would have ended an ex-president’s office allowance in 2003 or five years after leaving office, whichever was later. But the legislation was quietly repealed three years later, reportedly at the urging of the ex-presidents. The only perk the exes have ever lost is one they didn’t want. For several years in the 1980s, the government rented a townhouse in Washington exclusively for their use when they visited the capital. In 1988 the funding was cut because the property was almost never used.

  When he was in office, America’s newest ex-president was often fond of comparing himself to Harry Truman. In some ways the comparison is apt. Both George W. Bush and Harry Truman were mocked by critics as inarticulate and bumbling. Both presided over unpopular wars. (Of course, Truman was repelling an invasion, while Bush launched one.) As a result of those wars (and other factors), Bush and Truman both saw their approval ratings plummet. (In 2008, Bush’s sank to 22 percent, matching Harry’s low in 1952.)

  In a commencement address at West Point in 2006, Bush invoked Harry’s name seventeen times. He claimed his administration was “building on the legacy of Harry Truman.” And he equated the cold war with what he called “today’s war.” “Like the cold war,” Bush said, “we are fighting the followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom, crushes all dissent, has territorial ambitions, and pursues totalitarian aims.”

  The younger Bush believes history will vindicate him just as it has, in the eyes of many historians, vindicated Harry.

  Some historians are skeptical. “The only connection between Harry Truman and George Bush is that they left office with low opinion numbers,” Douglas Brinkley of Rice University told the Washington Post. “That’s a very thin reed.”

  However, as ex-presidents, Bush and Truman will definitely have at least one thing in common. Under legislation passed in 1995, all ex-presidents after Bill Clinton will receive Secret Service protection for only ten years after leaving office. (They can keep the rest of their generous pension packages.)

  So, on January 20, 2019, George W. Bush will become the first ex-president since Harry Truman with no legal right to taxpayer-funded protection.

  But I doubt we’ll see him and Laura driving back to Washington by themselves anytime soon.

  Afterword

  After this book came out in the spring of 2009, I was contacted by several people who claimed to know the whereabouts of Harry’s 1953 Chrysler New Yorker, the car in which he and Bess undertook their excellent adventure. Most of the tips were spurious, but one was tantalizing. At a book signing in Kansas City, I was approached by the Creasons, four siblings who’d read about the book in the Kansas City Star. The Creasons insisted that their father had bought Harry’s Chrysler back in the 1970s and that the car was stored in a barn on their family’s farm in northeastern Kansas. They showed me an old Polaroid of the car, which, I had to admit, looked a lot like Harry’s.

  I was intrigued, but more than a year would pass before I could fully investigate their claim. In early November 2010, I flew to Kansas City, rented a car, and drove out to the Creasons’ farm. It was an unseasonably warm day, and Carey Creason, one of the siblings who’d approached me at the book signing, was waiting for me outside her house. With her was her mother, Gladys Creason, as well as a lazy brown dog named Tanner, who, Gladys explained, just walked through the front gate one day and never left. “He adopted us.”

  I climbed up into Carey’s massive pickup for the short drive across the property to the barn where the Chrysler was stored. Gladys followed in the golf cart she uses to get around the farm. Bringing up the rear was Tanner, loping slowly. Ostensibly the Creasons raise vegetables, hay, and horses on their seventy-five acres, but from what I could see their most visible crop was metallic. Dotting the landscape were dozens of vintage automobiles in every conceivable state of repair.

  As we bounced along the dirt road to the barn, Carey explained how her family’s farm had come to be the final resting place for so many automobiles. “My dad liked to collect cars,” she said, “and he was a bit eccentric.” By Carey’s estimation, her father, Bob Creason, acquired at least seventy-five cars over the years. Some, like a 1935 Auburn 851, were immaculately restored. But many more were simply left to rust or were cannibalized for spare parts. “Dad would sometimes take two or three trucks and make one new one out of them,” Carey explained. “He’d take a fender from one, a hood from another, and put them together.”

  Bob’s eccentricity was not limited to automobiles. When natural gas was discovered on a piece of land he owned, he had it piped straight into a house on the property to heat it. When a county government invoked eminent domain to seize some o
f his property to build a racetrack, Bob fought the case all the way to the Kansas Supreme Court before finally reaching a settlement.

  On August 11, 2002, Bob Creason was hauling yet another old vehicle to the farm on a trailer when the brakes on his pickup failed. The truck and the trailer left the road and flipped over. Bob was killed instantly. He had celebrated his seventy-sixth birthday just four days earlier. His casket was taken to the cemetery in a 1925 Diamond T delivery truck that he had painstakingly restored. Carey Creason still lives on the farm, and she looks after the cars her father left behind. She and her siblings just don’t seem to have the heart to get rid of them.

  Carey pulled her pickup to a stop in front of the barn. We got out. Carey pulled the sliding door open and we walked inside, followed by her mother in her golf cart. Tanner stayed outside to lie in the sun.

  And there it was: a battered car parked headfirst against a wall at the back of the barn. It clearly was not in driving condition. The headlights were broken, the body was badly rusted, the tires were flat, and the trunk was caved in. Still, there was no doubt that this was a 1953 Chrysler New Yorker.

  But was it Harry’s?

  Carey opened a manila file folder she’d brought with her and spread the contents on the back of Gladys’s golf cart. The paperwork was convincing. She had the original title to the vehicle, dated February 16, 1953—the day Harry picked up his Chrysler at the Haines Motor Company in Independence. The owner was listed as Harry S. Truman. The document was signed “Harry S. Truman by C. L. Haines.” Apparently Harry had neglected to sign the title when he took possession of the car, so the dealer signed it for him.