The President Is a Sick Man
Page 26
As president, Harry occasionally drove his own limousine. Here he takes the wheel during a vacation in Key West in 1946.
Driving not only satisfied his need to keep moving; it also helped him gauge the country’s mood. “You have to get around and listen to what people are saying,” he said.
He fancied himself an excellent driver, naturally, but in reality, riding shotgun with Harry Truman could be a hair-raising adventure. As his longtime friend Mize Peters once told an interviewer, rather diplomatically, “I have driven with him when I was a little uneasy.”
By far his biggest vice was speed. Bess was right: Harry drove too fast.
On July 6, 1947, Truman drove a White House limousine back to Washington from an engagement in Charlottesville, Virginia. His passengers included Treasury Secretary John W. Snyder and Admiral William Leahy. Reporters clocked Truman at speeds approaching sixty-five miles per hour on country roads where the posted speed limit was fifty. When the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported the transgression, Truman responded with one of his legendary “longhand spasms.” “The pace was set by a capable, efficient State Policeman, in a State Police car,” he wrote in an angry letter to the paper. “I could not have exceeded the Virginia speed law if I had desired to do so—which I did not.” He never sent the letter.
There is no evidence that he was ever charged with a traffic violation, but Harry Truman’s driving record was not perfect. On Sunday, March 27, 1938, he was driving home from Washington with Bess and Margaret when he blew through a stop sign at a busy intersection in Hagerstown, Maryland. Another car plowed into them. Truman’s car—a brand-new Plymouth—rolled several times and was totaled. Nobody in either car was seriously injured. “It was almost a miracle that we escaped alive,” Margaret remembered. Truman claimed the stop sign was obscured by a parked car. No citations were issued, but a judge ordered Truman to pay the other driver ninety dollars for damages. In his later years, Harry’s escapades behind the wheel would become the stuff of legend in Independence. As the Kansas City Star once put it, Truman navigated the corridors of power more gracefully than the streets of his hometown. Mostly he was involved in fender benders. Usually he offered the other driver cash to pay for repairs—reportedly so Bess wouldn’t find out. (At least one driver refused the money, preferring to preserve his dent as a unique kind of presidential souvenir.) “I’d hear the fellows down at the filling station talk about Mr. Truman out driving around,” remembered Sue Gentry, associate editor of the Independence Examiner. “They’d say, ‘You’d better watch him—he’s getting a little wild out there.’”
Harry and Bess on a trip in 1957. The Trumans were one of those lucky couples who travel well together, though Bess always thought Harry drove too fast.
Bess, of course, had made Harry promise that he would drive no faster than fifty-five miles per hour, even though the speed limit on many highways at the time was sixty or sixty-five—and in some places there were no limits at all. (In Missouri, for example, drivers were merely required to maintain a “reasonable and prudent” speed.) But, owing to his lead foot, Harry found it almost impossible to keep that promise. Just a few miles outside Independence, Bess turned to him and said, “What does the speedometer say?”
”Fifty-five,” Harry answered.
“Do you think I’m losing my eyesight? Slow down!”
Harry obeyed, and soon everything else on the road was passing the decelerated Trumans. “Not only that,” Harry remembered, “but since we were going so slowly, they had a chance to look us over. Pretty soon the shouted greetings started: ‘Hi, Harry!’ ‘Where you going, Harry?’ ‘Hey! Wasn’t that Harry Truman?’”
“Well,” Harry said to Bess, a bit of I-told-you-so in his voice, “there goes our incognito—and I don’t mean a part of the car.”
About an hour after leaving Independence, they crossed the Missouri River near the town of Waverly. When Harry had first proposed the trip, Bess had had her doubts. But now that they were on the road, those doubts melted away in the withering heat. On the bridge over the Missouri, Bess turned to Harry. “Isn’t it good to be on our own again,” she said, “doing as we please as we did in the old Senate days?”
“I said that I thought it was grand,” Harry remembered, “and that I hoped we’d do as we pleased from that time on.”