Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (20 page)

Truman said he was “just a plain tourist” in New York. Although he and Bess had visited the city many times before, they had never really gone sightseeing. “I really don’t know much about this big city,” he confessed. Their guide would be Margaret, who had moved to the city the previous January to pursue a career in television. He reported that Margaret had driven Bess to New York in his new Chrysler and had liked the car so much that he was worried she might “take it away” from him.

Before sending the reporters away, Truman invited them to join him for his morning constitutional the next day. “If you boys can get up to the Waldorf before 7:00
A.M.
, you’ll be able to see me walking along Park Avenue.”

Later that afternoon, Harry took a cab uptown to meet Bess and Margaret at the Carlyle Hotel, where Margaret lived. Like a plain tourist, he would take cabs (though not the subway, it appears) everywhere while he was in New York. One excited cabbie ferrying the Trumans made an illegal turn on purpose, right in front of a traffic cop. “I want a ticket,” he said. “A ticket riding President Truman. So my wife’ll know.” The cop smiled and waved him on. The cabbie was disappointed.

Margaret cooked dinner for her parents in her apartment. At eight-thirty, Harry and Bess took a cab back to the Waldorf. “Margaret’s a good cook,” Harry reported.

The upper floors of the Waldorf-Astoria are known as the Waldorf Towers, a kind of hotel within a hotel, where rooms—sumptuously appointed apartments, actually—can be rented by the night or leased for long-term occupancy. This is where the Trumans stayed, in suite 32-A, which comprised a kitchen, six bedrooms, five full baths, and a seven-hundred-square-foot living room—quite a bit more than the couple of bedrooms and a parlor that Harry had requested. Cole Porter lived in 33-A, the suite directly above the Trumans. Douglas MacArthur, the intractable general whom Truman had fired two years earlier, resided five floors above, in 37-A. And directly below, in suite 31-A, lived the only other living ex-president, Herbert Hoover.

Harry Truman and Cole Porter apparently did not cross paths at the Waldorf, though, if they had, they would have had something to talk about: Dean Acheson, Truman’s dear friend and former secretary of state, had been Porter’s roommate at Harvard Law School. Nor did Truman encounter MacArthur in the hotel’s impeccably decorated halls, though the decorous staff surely took measures to prevent such an awkward rendezvous.

If Truman and Hoover met at the Waldorf, the event went unrecorded. Neither former president’s daily calendar indicates a meeting with the other, and there was no correspondence between them from mid-1952 to September 1953. It appears the two men, whose relationship was alternately testy and genial, were having a tiff.

Hoover had once been a genuine American hero, a self-made millionaire-turned-humanitarian who organized relief efforts that saved millions from starvation in Europe during and after World War I. In 1928 he was elected president in a landslide, but less than a year after he took office, Wall Street crashed and the Great Depression rose. After he lost the 1932 election to FDR, Hoover, rendered persona non grata in Washington, retired to California. In 1940 he moved into the Waldorf. When one of Roosevelt’s aides suggested that Hoover might be best qualified to oversee mobilization efforts on the home front during World War II, FDR dismissed the suggestion out of hand. “I’m not Jesus Christ,” he said. “I’m not raising him from the dead.”

It was Harry Truman who did that. Shortly after taking office, he invited Hoover to the White House “to talk over the European food situation.” Hoover accepted the invitation, and on the morning of May 28, 1945, he met with Truman in the Oval Office. It was the first time Hoover had set foot in the White House in more than twelve years.

Hoover was wary of Truman. After the way he’d been treated by Roosevelt, he said he was inclined to tell the Democrats “to all go to Hell.” But when Truman asked him to oversee relief efforts in postwar Europe and Asia, Hoover, ever the humanitarian, could not refuse.

In 1946 Truman appointed Hoover honorary chairman of the new Famine Emergency Committee, but Hoover’s role was anything but ceremonial. He traveled the world in an army transport plane, cajoling and begging grain-producing nations to donate some of their precious stocks to starving nations. In Venezuela he slipped in a bathtub, cracking several vertebrae, but refused to curtail his trip. In Argentina he resolved to “eat even Argentine dirt,” if that was what it took to get Juan Peron to release the 1.6 million tons of grain that Hoover wanted. Hoover got the grain.

Just as he had after World War I, Herbert Hoover had saved millions from starvation. “Yours was a real service for humanity,” Truman wrote him.

On April 30, 1947, Truman undid one of FDR’s more egregious slights against Hoover. He signed a bill restoring Boulder Dam’s original name: Hoover Dam. The gesture moved Hoover greatly. At a Gridiron Club dinner ten days later, Hoover praised Truman’s “high service to our country.” Hoover had come to respect and even like Truman, and the feeling was mutual. “With esteem and keen appreciation to a great man,” Truman scribbled on Hoover’s program that night.

Their budding friendship, however, could not survive electoral politics. In the 1952 presidential campaign, Truman, campaigning for Adlai Stevenson, repeatedly cited Hoover as the embodiment of all that was wrong with the Republican Party: reactionary, ruthless, callous. The Democrats had been running against Hoover since 1932, with much success, and Truman wasn’t about to stop now.

To Harry it was only politics, but old Herbert took it personally, and their fragile friendship shattered. It was unfortunate and sad. At the Waldorf, they were so close that if Harry had stomped on the floor, Herbert would have heard him. But both men were stubborn. There would be no rapprochement in New York.

To pundits, the image of Truman, Hoover, and MacArthur sharing the same building was irresistible. H. I. Phillips imagined the three towering figures meeting in a Waldorf elevator:

At seven o’clock the next morning, June 28, Harry stepped out of the Waldorf for his morning walk. The weather was warm and muggy, but the former president was characteristically dapper in a white summer suit with a double-breasted jacket. He wore a white Panama hat with a navy blue band. A crisp handkerchief peeked perfectly out of his breast pocket. “You all didn’t get much sleep,” he cheerily said to the dozen drowsy reporters and photographers gathered to document his ambulating.

Flanked by his former White House appointments secretary Matthew Connelly and a Waldorf security guard (provided at the hotel’s insistence), Harry headed west on 50th Street to Park Avenue. He turned north onto Park to 51st Street, then turned west onto 51st. It was early on a summer Sunday morning, and midtown Manhattan was as sleepy as it ever gets, but everywhere Harry went he was recognized. At 51st and Madison, a cabbie yelled, “Hiya, Harry!” Truman waved. At 51st and Fifth, a bus driver yelled out, “Hello, Harry!” Truman waved again.

He turned south onto Fifth Avenue, passing St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the early mass was just beginning. He stopped in front of the cathedral to shake hands with a cop who recognized him, and to chat briefly with a churchgoer he happened to bump into. Her name was Marguerite Peyton Thompson. Harry knew her. She was a member of the Democratic National Committee and had seconded his nomination at the 1948 convention in Philadelphia. “I’m just going to church,” Thompson said to Truman. “Good woman!” he replied. (Truman himself did not attend church regularly. He once wrote of his Baptist faith, “I’m a member but not a strenuous one.”)

At 44th Street, the photographers accompanying him asked Harry to stop and pose for a picture with the Empire State Building in the background. He agreed, but on one condition, a condition that endeared him to New Yorkers. “The one thing I want you to do,” he told the photographers, whose spent flashbulbs littered the sidewalk and street, “is to kick those damn bulbs to the curb.” Used flashbulbs were a scourge to motorists and pedestrians alike. The scolded photographers sheepishly complied.

From Fifth Avenue he turned east onto 43rd Street to Madison Avenue, then headed back uptown on Madison. He walked briskly as usual, and by now some in the press pack were panting.

On Madison, just north of 43rd, Matthew Connelly spotted a quarter lying heads up in the street. He picked it up and handed it to his old boss. “Here’s a little luck for you,” Connelly said. Truman took the quarter. He held it up and studied the raised image of one of his predecessors for a moment. He slipped it into his pocket. “That goes in my collection,” he said, promising never to spend it.

A few blocks later, a beefy cabbie named Marcus Straisant recognized the former president. He hastily parked his cab and rushed toward him. “How are ya?” Straisant asked excitedly, thrusting his hand toward the former president. “How’s your family? You got a lot of friends here, they’d all vote for you anytime.”

Truman was startled by the cabbie’s effusiveness. He took a step back, smiling. “You embarrass me,” he said.

From Madison he turned east onto 48th Street, then north on Park Avenue back to the hotel. It was 7:22. In all he covered some twenty-one blocks in twenty-four minutes. The
New York Times
calculated that he covered a north–south block in eighty-seven steps. He dismissed the press corps. “Roll call at the same time tomorrow,” he said. “I expect all you men to muster here.”

Harry shakes hands with New York cabbie Harry Lefkowitz while another cabbie, Marcus Straisant, looks on, June 28, 1953.

At one o’clock that afternoon, Margaret picked up her parents at the Waldorf in her new four-door Lincoln sedan. With Margaret behind the wheel, Harry in the passenger’s seat, and Bess in back, they drove to the River Club at 447 East 52nd Street, where they had lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Longwell. Mr. Longwell was the executive editor of
Life
magazine, which held the serial rights to Truman’s memoirs. After the meal, though, Truman insisted, not very believably, that he and Longwell had not discussed the memoirs. “We talked about ex-presidents, ex-secretaries of state, and sealing wax and shoes,” he said with a laugh.

Margaret dropped off her parents back at the Waldorf at 3:45. Bess stuck her head back into the car to say good-bye to her daughter. “Come on, Ma.” Harry chided Bess. “You’re blocking traffic.”

Harry and Bess stayed in that night. Maybe they ordered room service for dinner. In any event, they celebrated their wedding anniversary quietly.

Exactly thirty-four years before, on June 28, 1919, Harry S. Truman and Elizabeth Virginia Wallace had been married at Trinity Episcopal Church in Independence. They’d met as children in Sunday school but didn’t marry until he was thirty-five and she was thirty-four. Their courtship was complicated by the fact that Bess’s mother, Madge Wallace, didn’t think Harry was good enough for her daughter—an opinion she retained, to some degree, even after Harry became president.

Harry had just returned from military service in France the month before the wedding. One of his army buddies wrote Harry, “I hope you have the same success in this new war as you had in the old.” But their marriage was no war. As Harry and Bess grew older their love seems only to have deepened. “You are still on that pedestal where I placed you that day in Sunday school in 1890,” he wrote her on their twenty-ninth anniversary in 1948. “What an old fool I am.”

It’s unlikely a more loving couple than Harry and Bess Truman ever occupied the White House.

When a Washington newspaper described Bess as “dumpy,” Harry countered that she looked exactly how a woman her age ought to look. While they were in New York, Harry’s friend Leonard Lyons, a
New York Post
columnist, offered to arrange a private screening of the new Marilyn Monroe movie
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Harry declined. “Real gentlemen,” he told Lyons, “prefer gray hair.”

Theirs was an “ideal marriage,” according to Stanley Fike, a family friend. “Never been any question in my mind or in the mind of anyone I have ever known, but that there was only one woman in Harry Truman’s life and that was Bess Truman, Bess Wallace Truman.”

Since Bess never cared for the spotlight, it’s not surprising she and Harry celebrated their anniversary in privacy.