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

by Matthew Algeo

  At one point, Kehne asked Truman to give Kefauver a hard time for being a Republican. “Na,” said Truman. “It’s too hot to give anybody hell.”

  When Truman finished the Coke, Kehne saved the empty bottle.

  Back outside, the newspaper photographers and newsreel camera operators asked Harry and Bess to pose with Kehne reading a map. It was preposterous, of course; Harry knew the way to Washington by heart. But he obliged them, smiling, as he always did.

  Harry finishes off his Coke at Carroll Kehne’s service station in Frederick, Maryland, June 21, 1953, while Kehne (left) and his mechanic Albert Kefauver watch. When Kehne asked Truman to give Kefauver a hard time for being a Republican, Harry said it was “too hot to give anybody hell.”

  Years later, in his memoir Mr. Citizen, Truman recalled the scene at the Gulf station:

  The press caught up with us at the filling station in Frederick where I had always filled up in times past. I was reminded of the time my mother visited us at the White House. I had wanted her to meet some of these same press correspondents, but I was a little uncertain how she would take to the idea, so I put off saying anything about it until I was leading her from the plane into the midst of them. Then I said: “Mama, these are photographers and reporters. They want to take your picture and talk to you.”

  “Fiddlesticks,” she said. “They don’t want to see me. If I had known this would happen, I would have stayed home!”

  There on the road in Frederick, I felt the same way she did.

  Really? According to the New York Times, “Mr. Truman … greeted the photographers and reporters at Frederick like long-lost brothers.” “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he said.

  The newsreel footage of the former president at Carroll Kehne’s Gulf station would be shown in movie theaters around the world. When it was shown at a theater in Whittier, California—Richard Nixon’s hometown—the applause was so loud, according to one attendee, it drowned out the audio.

  In 1975 Carroll Kehne closed his service station. He was sixty-five. It was time to retire. Besides, the business was changing. “This is what you call the old, country-type gas station,” he told the Frederick Post shortly before the closing. “Where people always gather and have good times. But this is one of the last.”

  “All the new stations are concerned with,” he complained, “is just how quick you get in and how quick you get out.”

  The Coke bottle that Harry Truman drank from at Carroll Kehne’s service station in Frederick, Maryland, on June 21, 1953. After Kehne died, his son donated the bottle to the Historical Society of Frederick County.

  The striking deco service station was torn down shortly after it closed. In its place stands a transmission shop’s nondescript, four-bay garage.

  Carroll Kehne died in 1994. Among his belongings, his son found the Coke bottle that Harry Truman had drunk from all those years before. Carroll Jr. donated it to the Historical Society of Frederick County, where it currently resides, lovingly swaddled in acid-free archival paper.

  In honor of Harry’s pit stop in Frederick, H. I. Phillips composed a poem for his syndicated newspaper column. It was a spoof on “Barbara Frietchie,” a John Greenleaf Whittier poem about a Frederick woman who became a local hero when she allegedly stood up to Confederate troops during the Civil War.

  Up from the meadows rich with corn,

  Clear in the steaming mid-June morn,

  The gasoline stations of Frederick stand

  And give to Harry a hearty hand.

  Round about them the tourists sweep;

  Clicking and clacking the meters creep;

  Routine and drab is the station’s way,

  Oftentimes dull … but NOT THIS DAY!

  8

  Washington, D.C.,

  June 21–26, 1953

  At 5:40 P.M. on Sunday, June 21, Harry and Bess pulled up in front of the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. A doorman helped Harry on with his double-breasted suit jacket. Harry supervised the unloading of luggage.

  Never before had a former president returned to the capital quite like this: driving his own car in his shirtsleeves, as if he were nothing more than a curious tourist—which, Harry insisted with a gleam in his eye, is all he was.

  Margaret was waiting for her parents at the hotel. She had come down from New York to stay with them while they were in Washington, acting as a kind of unofficial press secretary, a role she clearly relished.

  The Truman family stayed in suite 676, which had been redecorated especially for them. (C. J. “Neal” Mack, the hotel manager, jokingly called it the “ex-presidential suite.”) There was a parlor with green walls and white-shaded lamps, a small dining room, two bedrooms, and a kitchen. For this, Mack had agreed to charge the Trumans a “special daily rate” of just fifteen dollars. That was a significant discount: the usual rate was thirty-six dollars.

  A doorman helps Harry on with his jacket upon his arrival at the Mayflower Hotel, June 21, 1953. Harry liked the Mayflower so much he called it “Washington’s second-best address.”

  Shortly after checking in, Truman invited the reporters who’d covered his return to the capital up to his suite.

  “You’re awfully nice to come up here just to see an old has-been,” he said as they filed in. To all questions about politics, Congress, Ike, or Korea, his answer was the same: “No comment.” Mostly he just wanted to talk about the drive from Missouri. It was exactly 1,055 miles from his home in Independence to the Mayflower, he reported. With a touch of pride, he added that his new Chrysler was getting sixteen to seventeen miles a gallon.

  The trip, he said, was “wonderful,” “lovely.”

  His smile, one reporter noted, was wider than ever.

  He said he had no plans to see President Eisenhower. “He’s too busy to see every Tom, Dick, and Harry that comes to town,” he said, putting special emphasis on the last name.

  He said he only came back to Washington to see “old friends” and insisted he would be “keeping away from politics.” He was, of course, being disingenuous. Over the next four days Truman presided over a veritable government in exile, meeting with Democratic Party leaders and even calling together his old cabinet. He was back in his element, and he couldn’t have been happier. “He was like a kid on holiday,” journalist Charles Robbins recalled, “exchanging quips with the newsmen, welcoming his former staff and members of his cabinet, hurrying from one telephone to another to talk to senators, representatives, judges.”

  And he did it all right under Eisenhower’s nose. The White House, Robbins said, “maintained a tomblike silence” while Harry was in town.

  At the time, there was a rumor going around Washington that Truman would run for president again in 1956, with Adlai Stevenson as his running mate—or, perhaps, vice versa. Truman insisted he wasn’t interested in running for anything, but, judging by the way he behaved on his return to the capital, it was hard to believe him.

  No hotel has played a more important role in American politics than the Mayflower. Just two weeks after it opened in 1925, it hosted an inaugural ball for Calvin Coolidge (which the famously reticent president did not attend). Herbert Hoover lived at the hotel between his election and inauguration, as did FDR, who wrote his first inaugural address in suite 776. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his longtime aide Clyde Tolson ate lunch side by side in the hotel’s Town & Country Lounge nearly every day for twenty years. Queen Elizabeth and Winston Churchill stayed there. So did the Chinese delegation negotiating détente with the Nixon administration in 1973. Gerald Ford was offered the vice presidency there.

  Harry Truman liked the Mayflower. As vice president, he once sat in with the hotel’s band. “He played piano with us (The Fairy Waltz, Chopsticks, etc.) and it was very cozy,” the Mayflower’s bandleader, Sidney Seidenman, wrote in a letter to his son, who was in the army at the time. “He seems a very swell guy. I don’t suppose the German Vice Presidential equivalent would go around playing piano wit
h the likes of me, now, would he?” In a 1948 speech at the hotel, Truman declared his candidacy for election to the presidency in his own right. (“I want to say that during the next four years there will be a Democrat in the White House, and you are looking at him!”) The following January, he celebrated his inauguration there. That was an especially joyous event for Truman, who had, of course, been unable to celebrate his ascension to the presidency theretofore. The Mayflower, he said, was “Washington’s second-best address,” a phrase that now appears on T-shirts sold in the hotel’s gift shop.

  What you won’t find in the gift shop is any mention of the hotel’s role in some of Washington’s most salacious political scandals. If the Mayflower’s walls could talk, they would have been subpoenaed—or bought off—a long, long time ago.

  Kennedy’s alleged mistress, Judith Exner, kept a room at the hotel, and JFK is said to have met Angie Dickinson at the Mayflower for more than drinks. A former girlfriend of Washington Mayor Marion Barry testified that she smoked crack with him at the Mayflower in 1989. (That infamous undercover video, however—“Bitch set me up!”—was shot across town at the Vista.) Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky were famously photographed embracing at a campaign event at the Mayflower in 1996, and, three years later, Lewinsky was interviewed in the hotel’s presidential suite by House investigators trying to impeach the president.

  More recently, on February 13, 2008, New York governor Eliot Spitzer (aka client 9) met a call girl named “Kristen” in room 871. That tryst would cost Spitzer forty-three hundred dollars and his political career.

  On Monday morning, Bess and Margaret went out to do some shopping while Harry and a group of his old advisors convened in his suite to put the finishing touches on the speech he would deliver in Philadelphia later that week. The first draft had been prepared by David Lloyd, his White House speechwriter. “It was a lively exegetical session,” remembered Charles Robbins, who was there. “He would read a line or two aloud, then pause for comment. From the ensuing argument, the laughter and byplay, there slowly emerged a different speech.” Harry replaced all the fifty-cent words with much cheaper ones. “The final product,” wrote Robbins, “was pretty much all his.”

  At noon, Truman went to the Capitol for lunch with Democratic members of Missouri’s congressional delegation. He went by limousine. The Packard Motor Car Company had offered him the use of a brand-new eighty-five-hundred-dollar limo while he was in Washington. (The company also provided a “smartly uniformed” chauffeur.) The limousine was identical to two that the company had recently delivered to the White House for President Eisenhower’s use.

  “We shipped this car down from Detroit for the use of Mr. Truman as a courtesy,” explained Donald C. Jeffrey, Packard’s manager of government sales. “We don’t play sides.” Truman, who was probably a little tired of driving anyway, gladly took the company up on its offer. His Chrysler would spend the rest of the week in the Mayflower garage.

  At lunch, Truman told his fellow Missouri Democrats that their party was “on the comeback trail.” He said farmers back home were organizing “Never Again” clubs, promising to never again vote Republican. “We gave them three-hundred-dollar cows,” he said, “now they’ve got thirty-dollar Eisenhower calves.”

  Walking back to the limousine after lunch, Truman was mobbed outside the Capitol by tourists who had come to see the sights, never expecting to see one in the flesh. They crowded close around him, jostling for position, begging for an autograph or a handshake or a snapshot. As was his policy, he patiently obliged every request. Once, when asked how he coped with such onslaughts, Truman laughed and said he tried to put himself in other people’s shoes and imagine how he would feel “if some supposed bigshot high-hatted me.”

  Occasionally, however, his patience was tested. At a college basketball tournament in Kansas City, about three hundred autograph seekers rushed his box when he and Bess were introduced over the public address system. Even after it was announced that he would give no autographs while the game was in progress, “the more rugged members of the crowd” continued to pester him with their requests. “We never saw the finish of the game,” he remembered. “Our host lost his nerve and smuggled us out with five minutes left to go.”

  On the way back to the Mayflower in his limousine, Truman spotted his good friend and erstwhile secretary of state, the debonair Dean Acheson, walking alone along 17th Street NW. Truman had his driver honk the horn repeatedly, but Acheson, lost in thought, paid no attention. Finally the limo pulled up alongside him. Truman stuck his head out the window. “You’re the hardest pickup I ever encountered,” he said. For five minutes the former president and his former secretary of state chatted casually on a Washington sidewalk, just like old friends, which they were. Acheson asked Truman about the drive from Independence. “Had a governor on the seat with me,” Harry said, referring to Bess as a speed-regulation device. “Had it up to seventy a few times, but she’d always pull me in.”

  That night the Trumans attended a cookout at Clark Clifford’s house. Clifford had been Harry’s White House counsel and would go on to advise three more Democratic presidents, becoming the ultimate Washington insider. He and his wife, Marny, lived in an antebellum farmhouse on Rockville Pike in Bethesda, Maryland.

  It was a typical American barbecue in every way—save for the guest list. Besides the former president and first lady, Chief Justice Fred Vinson and his wife were among the twenty-two high-powered attendees.

  Cocktails preceded dinner. Clifford, wearing an apron, cooked the steaks himself on a charcoal grill on the patio. The guests ate at tables set up in the Cliffords’ sprawling backyard. It was, Bess Truman later wrote, the happiest evening she and Harry had spent in a long, long time.

  At the cookout, Harry renewed his acquaintance with the Cliffords’ thirteen-year-old daughter, Randall. Her father had taken Randall to the White House many times when he worked there, and Harry had befriended her. When she was eight, Randall sent the president a photograph of her in her Brownie uniform. Truman wrote her back, thanking her for the picture. “He was wonderful to me,” Randall remembered.

  Some thirty years later, on a vacation with her own family in the early 1980s, Randall visited the Truman Library. The former president’s desk was on display. On it she saw an old photograph of a smiling buck-toothed little girl in a Brownie uniform.

  It was the photograph she’d sent the president.

  Clark and Marny Clifford died in 1998 and 2000, respectively, and the family sold the house on Rockville Pike to a young couple named Tim and Kristen. I mailed them a copy of an old newspaper clipping about the Truman cookout and asked if I—a perfect stranger—could visit their home. I was happily surprised when they said yes.

  Like Harry and Bess, I visited the home on a steamy early summer evening. Unlike Harry and Bess, I took the subway. The home is a short walk from the Medical Center stop on the Washington Metro’s Red Line. What was once a rural farmhouse has been completely engulfed by suburbia. To reach it, I had to negotiate a bewildering maze of intentionally winding (and sidewalk-free) streets in postwar subdivisions. Many were the driveways with portable basketball hoops.

  When I arrived, Kristen gave me a tour of the house while Tim finished cleaning up after dinner and while their three young children, accompanied by a friend, wreaked playful havoc. Joining us on the tour was Kristen’s father, Doug, a gregarious George Kennedy look-alike who has researched the history of the house. He’d come over specially to see me.

  As Doug explained, the old wooden house is an excellent example of the Georgian revival style, a classic “two over two,” with two rooms on the first floor divided by a center hallway and staircase, and two rooms on the second. Later additions were built on either side of the house, doubling its size.

  After the tour, Kristen went off to help Tim while Doug and I took seats at the dining room table. Doug showed me a sixteen-page history of the house he’d written. He also produced a thick three-ring binde
r filled with photographs and photocopied tax and census records, each carefully inserted inside a protective plastic sleeve. It was heartening to see him taking the history of his daughter and son-in-law’s home so seriously. It was also nice of him to have done so much research for me, bless his heart.

  Doug’s sleuthing revealed that the house was built in 1854 by a farmer named Samuel Perry. At the time, Perry owned 444 acres along Rockville Pike, already a well-trod route connecting the capital and Rockville, Maryland. Perry and his son-in-law also owned a dozen slaves, who lived in a small stone cottage on the property.

  Doug also discovered that Harry Truman was not the first president to visit the home—nor the last. In 1910, when the house was owned by an adventurer named Leigh Hunt, his friend Teddy Roosevelt stopped by. Like Harry, TR embarked on a long trip shortly after leaving the White House, though Teddy’s was slightly more adventurous: he went on an African safari. Upon his return he delivered to Hunt two souvenirs he’d picked up on his travels, stuffed and mounted lion and hippopotamus heads, which Hunt hung over the mantle in the living room. Clark and Marny Clifford bought the house in 1950, and over the next half-century they would entertain a parade of future, current, or former presidents: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and the elder Bush. On the day he left office, Johnson came over for lunch. So, in all, at least five presidents have visited the house, which must be some kind of record for a private home in Bethesda, anyway.

  Tim and Kristen have done a lot of remodeling since they bought the house (including the removal of Clark Clifford’s thirty-two-line switchboard in the basement). They said they haven’t seen any ghosts, no visions of Harry in his summer suit, enjoying a bourbon in the backyard, though they did discover a bust of Clifford in a closet. (Kristen said she contacted the Clifford family but was told she could keep it since “everybody in the family who wanted a bust of him already had one.”) They’ve had many cookouts in the big backyard, but, so far, anyway, none has been attended by a president. In fact, when I asked Kristen who their most famous house-guest had been, she thought for a moment and said, “You.”