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

by Matthew Algeo

  Today the Truman home is managed by the National Park Service as part of the Harry S Truman National Historic Site in Independence. (Truman had no middle name—the “S” was meant to honor both his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young—so the period after his middle initial is optional. The Park Service does not use one, unlike the National Archives and Records Administration, which runs the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. Truman himself claimed to be neutral on the matter, though he usually used a period when signing his name.)

  More than thirty thousand people visit the Truman home every year, but on my tour there were just two other people, a thirteen-year-old girl and her grandfather. The girl claimed her favorite subject was history, but thought the Germans had bombed Pearl Harbor and was unable to name Truman’s predecessor in the White House. Her grandfather seemed unusually interested in the home’s bathroom fixtures. Maybe he was a plumber. Our guide was a friendly ranger named Norton, who looked exactly like Santa Claus with a ponytail and a Smokey Bear hat. The house looks much as it did when Harry and Bess returned from Washington in 1953. The kitchen is painted a bright apple green with cherry red accents. Against the wall is a small red Formica table where Harry and Bess took most of their meals, a Proctor-Silex toaster standing sentinel on top. The furnishings throughout the house are simple, almost Spartan. A small reading room is lined with bookshelves sagging under the weight of history tomes and murder mysteries. There are two well-worn upholstered chairs—his and hers. On the end table next to hers lies a Dorothy L. Sayers novel. In the front parlor, a massive black-and-white television set is parked incongruously against one wall, near a piano. Norton, our guide, explained that Bess liked to watch baseball games. (Bess was a good athlete in her own right. Harry liked to brag that she was “the best shortstop they ever had in Independence.”)

  The Trumans were frugal, a blessing to the home’s preservationists. Norton pointed to a water-stained patch of wallpaper in the front parlor. It was being replaced by extra paper that Harry had saved and stored in the attic. In fact, the paper from the attic was so well preserved that it would have to be artificially aged before replacing the stained bit. But the Trumans’ frugality had a downside, too. As Norton explained, when the Park Service took over the property in 1983, it was in such poor condition that the repairs cost several hundred thousand dollars. It was said that only the paint was holding the house together.

  When they left the White House, there was speculation that the Trumans might move to Key West, where they had often vacationed when Harry was president, or New York, where Margaret lived. But they returned to Independence, partly out of principle. As Harry liked to say, “I tried never to forget who I was and where I’d come from and where I’d go back to.”

  There were practical advantages, too, to moving back to Independence. It was near the Truman farm in Grandview, Missouri, where Harry hoped to build his presidential library. And nobody made a big fuss over them. Visitors from out of town would occasionally come to the house, asking for an autograph or a handshake, a request Harry always obliged. But, by and large, the locals would leave the Trumans alone. Bess could drive to the library or push her cart around the supermarket without causing a stir. Harry could take his morning walks unmolested, often accompanied by Mike Westwood, an Independence cop assigned to the former president part-time.

  But the Trumans also came back to Independence because they couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. They already owned the house on Delaware Street. Given their limited income, it just didn’t make sense to move anywhere else.

  Back in Independence, Harry soon settled into a routine. He awoke every morning at five-thirty, dressed, read the morning papers (on the back porch when the weather was nice), picked a cane from his collection of a hundred or so, and took his walk. His route varied. Sometimes he would walk down to the town square, passing the Jackson County Courthouse, which had been built in 1934, back when he was the county’s presiding judge. Other times he would meander through the residential neighborhoods around his home. An old newsreel shows Truman enjoying one of his walks when a small boy in a cowboy costume suddenly jumps out of the bushes and “shoots” the former president with a toy gun. Truman laughs and pats the irrepressible tyke on the head. Today, a Secret Service agent watching the film would likely suffer a heart attack, and the unlucky youngster who attempted such an ambush would perish in a hail of gunfire.

  Harry headed out for one of his morning walks, November 18, 1954. “I was always a walker,” he said. “I never did believe in being afraid to go on foot to the corner store, the way a lot of people are.”

  Back at the house, he had breakfast at the kitchen table with Bess (who did not share his penchant for early rising). Around nine he went into his office, a three-room suite on the eleventh floor of the Federal Reserve Building in Kansas City. Sometimes Mike Westwood drove him, but often he drove himself. “Harry S. Truman” was painted in black letters on the opaque glass of the door to the suite, just like a detective agency in a pulp novel. (Truman claimed the only reason he’d even put his name on the door was because people kept mistaking his office for a restroom.) He had two assistants: his private secretary, Rose Conway, who had served him in the same capacity when he was president, and Frances Myers, a receptionist who had also worked in the Truman White House. He paid their salaries out of his own pocket. Much of his day was spent answering mail. He received more than seventy thousand pieces in the first two weeks after he left the White House, and as many as a thousand a day thereafter: notes from well-wishers, invitations to everything from church suppers to national conventions, autograph requests. Budding politicians wrote him asking for advice (or endorsements). The founder of a new cult tried to recruit him. When Truman casually mentioned in an interview that he was looking for a silver dollar minted in 1924, the year of Margaret’s birth, silver dollars poured in by the dozens. Truman estimated that less than one-half of one percent of the letters came from “crackpots,” a statistic that surprised him. “I expected more,” he said. “I had many chances to make people mad.”

  He answered each and every piece of mail because, he said, “I have always believed that if a person goes to the trouble of writing a letter, even a critical letter, I should answer or at least acknowledge it.” The postage was, of course, solely his responsibility. At three cents a pop, it would cost him nearly ten thousand dollars in just his first year out of office.

  Truman maintained an open-door policy, and just about anybody who dropped by was likely to get an audience with the former president. “Many people,” he said, “feel that a president or an ex-president is partly theirs—and they are right to some extent—and that they have a right to call upon him.” His office number was even listed in the Kansas City telephone directory: Baltimore 6150. (His home number was unlisted, probably in deference to Bess.)

  When he wasn’t answering mail, entertaining uninvited visitors, or taking unsolicited telephone calls, Truman was busy raising money—not for himself but for the grand library he planned to build on the family farm in Grandview. The library would serve as a repository for his papers, which, for the time being, were stored in four hundred four-drawer filing cabinets in a room on the fourth floor of the Jackson County Courthouse.

  With his keen sense of history, Truman well understood the importance of preserving his papers. “Did you know that Millard Fillmore’s son burned some of his papers?” he asked an interviewer. “A good many of Jackson’s papers were lost—some were found again, but a good many were lost…. Lincoln’s son burned some of his papers. Think of it, some of Abraham Lincoln’s papers burned! It’s awful.”

  Truman envisioned the library as a “research center for the benefit of small colleges” in the Midwest. He wasn’t interested in a memorial to himself, he insisted. “I’ll be cussed and discussed for the next generation anyway.” Besides, Truman didn’t think much of memorials to the living. “You can never tell what foolishness they may get into before the
y get into a pine box and then the memorial sometimes has to be torn down.”

  A private corporation called the Harry S. Truman Library, Inc., had been established to raise money for the project—money that could not be used for Truman’s personal or business expenses.

  Around four o’clock he would go home. After dinner, he listened to a newscast or two on the radio. Then he retired to the reading room, where he indulged his passion for history. By ten o’clock he was in bed.

  It was, in many respects, a perfectly ordinary life.

  Truman, however, still needed money. He was, he wrote, under a “heavy burden of personal expense.” He could have solved his financial problems overnight by accepting one of the many lucrative offers that came his way. A chain of clothing stores offered him a job for a hundred thousand dollars a year as a “sales manager.” Another firm offered him an eight-year, eight-hundred-thousand-dollar contract requiring him to “work” just one hour a day. A sewing machine company offered him “a salary in six figures” for doing nothing more than making occasional public appearances. There were lucrative offers to appear on a radio program, or to put his name on a brand of soap. Truman refused them all. He would do nothing that would “commercialize” the presidency, he said, nothing that would exploit or trivialize the office in any way.

  Occasionally he accepted modest fees for giving speeches, which he donated to his library fund. Beyond that, he refused to cash in on his status as a former president. It was a principle that future ex-presidents would abandon.

  In early February, just a few weeks after leaving office, it was announced that Truman had agreed to sell his memoirs to Doubleday for an advance of six hundred thousand dollars. It was an astronomical sum, especially in 1953, when the average worker’s annual salary was barely more than four thousand. It was assumed the former president’s financial worries were over. Like Grant before him, he’d been saved from financial ruin by a book deal. But the truth was far different.

  For one thing, the advance would be taxed as income, at a rate of 67 percent. Four years earlier, when Truman was in the White House, the IRS had allowed Dwight Eisenhower to claim his $635,000 advance on Crusade in Europe as a capital gain, rather than income, reasoning that the general was not a writer by profession. That reduced the tax on Ike’s advance to 25 percent. When Truman asked the IRS for permission to claim his own advance as a capital gain, as Eisenhower had, his request was denied. This did little to improve relations between the ex-president and the incumbent.

  Out of what remained of his advance, Truman would have to pay a small army of researchers, stenographers, and ghostwriters, not to mention his other expenses. Years later, Truman would declare—with more than a touch of bitterness—that out of that six-hundred-thousand-dollar advance, he had realized just thirty-seven thousand dollars.

  Still, the book deal allowed him to splurge just a little bit. In March, he, Bess, and Margaret took a Hawaiian vacation, though Harry’s friends Averill Harriman and Ed Pauley picked up most of the tab. And, even before that, Harry went shopping for a car. He needed one. Since returning to Independence he’d either been using Margaret’s, which was stored in the garage, or borrowing his brother-in-law’s.

  Few presidents loved automobiles as much as Harry Truman did. His first car was a 1911 Stafford, which he purchased used in 1914 for $600 (or $650—accounts vary). Hand-built in Kansas City by a mechanic named Terry Stafford, it was a flashy car, black with brass accents, a thirty-horsepower engine, and a three-speed transmission. On a good road it was capable of speeds as fast as sixty miles per hour. This was no Model T. Legend has it that he bought the Stafford to impress Bess, whom he was courting at the time. It certainly made it easier for him to commute from his family’s farm in Grandview to Bess’s house in Independence. Previously, he had had to catch a train or a trolley. In the Stafford, Harry took Bess for afternoon drives, and Sunday picnics along the Little Blue River. When his National Guard unit was called up in 1917, he took the car with him to Camp Doniphan in Oklahoma, where he was stationed for training. Before he was shipped overseas, Harry reluctantly sold the Stafford to an army sergeant for two hundred dollars. “It was an excellent car,” he wrote, “and would take an awful beating. You can be sure of that if one lasted me as long as three years, which that one did.”

  Harry behind the wheel of his first car, a 1911 Stafford, at a picnic around 1915. “It was an excellent car,” he said. Seated next to him is Bess Wallace, the future Mrs. Truman. The other passengers are Bess’s relatives.

  For the rest of his life, Truman bought nothing but Chryslers, Dodges, and Plymouths. In November 1940, he bought two: a gray 1941 Chrysler Royal Club coupe for himself and a gray Chrysler Windsor sedan for Bess. They were the last cars he had owned. After he became president, he gave the coupe to his sister and sold the sedan to a friend in Washington.

  Shortly after he started shopping for a new car, Truman received a telephone call from K. T. Keller, the chairman of the Chrysler Corporation.

  “Lincolns seemed to have had the inside track at the White House while you were there,” Keller told Truman, referring to the presidential limousine fleet. “But we want you to use a Chrysler.”

  “What kind of a model do you suggest?” Truman asked.

  “Our best model is the Imperial.”

  “That sounds a little too swanky for me. What else do you recommend?”

  “Our New Yorker is next,” Keller said. “However, Mr. President, I hope you realize that we want you to have this car with our compliments.”

  Truman demurred. “I’m a private citizen now,” he said. “I don’t think I should get any privileges that wouldn’t come to any other private citizen…. I’m going to have a Chrysler all right. But I’m going to pay for it.”

  Much was made of the fact that Truman paid for his own car. Exactly how much he paid, however, is unknown. The list price was around four thousand dollars, but Truman probably paid much, much less. “I suspect the agreed price might have been one dollar,” speculated a Chrysler official who was familiar with the transaction. Harry Truman was a man of scruples, to be sure, but some deals were simply too good to pass up.

  Harry beams as he inspects his new 1953 Chrysler New Yorker at the Haines Motor Company in Independence, February 16, 1953. “It’s got so many gadgets on it I’ll have to go to engineering school to handle it,” he said.

  Truman took delivery of the New Yorker at the Haines Motor Company in Independence on February 16, 1953. It was a black, four-door sedan with chrome wire wheels and whitewall tires. The interior was a beautiful tan velour. Powered by a 331-cubic-inch V-8 FirePower engine (later known as a Hemi), it boasted all the latest technological innovations, including a PowerFlite automatic transmission, power steering, and power brakes. “It’s got so many gadgets on it I’ll have to go to engineering school to handle it,” Truman cracked. Chrysler sent a young engineer named Frederick Stewart to Independence to help Harry get acquainted with the vehicle. With Stewart driving, Harry in the passenger seat, and Bess in back, they spent about two hours driving the back roads of Jackson County, with Stewart explaining the car’s many features.

  Finally it was Harry’s turn to get behind the wheel. “It was soon apparent that Mr. Truman hadn’t done much driving recently,” Stewart remembered, “so we sort of made this drive a little refresher course on driving the very latest in automobiles.” Eventually Harry got the hang of things, and the three of them headed back into town. Driving past the Jackson County Courthouse, Truman told Stewart how there had been ten thousand dollars left over after the courthouse was built, so Truman arbitrarily decided to have a statue of his hero, Andrew Jackson, erected out front. It was, he told Stewart, the only thing he had ever done in his political career that he could have been put in jail for.

  The next day, Truman sent K. T. Keller a thank you note. “That wonderful Chrysler arrived yesterday,” he wrote. “It certainly is a peach of a car and I can’t tell you how very much I ap
preciate the courtesies which you have extended to me. I’ll think of you whenever I take a ride and that will be rather frequently you can be sure.”

  Harry Truman’s 1953 Chrysler New Yorker is still out there somewhere, in a dusty garage or weathered barn. According to Mark Beveridge, the Truman Library’s registrar and unofficial “car guy,” the Chrysler is owned by a collector who “wishes to remain anonymous.” I was eager to see the car, of course, so I asked Beveridge if he would be willing to forward a letter from me to the anonymous collector. “No,” he said apologetically. Beveridge hopes the collector will eventually donate the Chrysler to the museum, and he didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize that acquisition.

  I wasn’t about to give up that easily, so I placed ads in classic car newsletters—nothing. I posted pleas on Internet bulletin boards—still nothing. I even enlisted the help of a private investigator, again to no avail. My quest, however, did turn up another 1953 Chrysler New Yorker, much like Harry Truman’s.

  Back in 1971, Alan Hais was twenty-five years old and just starting his first job as an environmental engineer for the District of Columbia. He was looking for a cheap car to get him around town when he spotted an ad in the paper for a 1953 New Yorker. The asking price was three hundred dollars. Hais and a friend drove out to Fredericksburg, Virginia, to check out the then eighteen-year-old car, but when he learned it had ninety-seven thousand miles on it, Hais got cold feet. When he and his friend stopped for burgers on the way home, though, Hais reconsidered. “It was a good solid car,” he remembered. “So I said, well, we might as well go back.” Hais drove the car home, with his friend following just in case.