Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (6 page)

“Nobody worried much then,” Harry countered, “and we made it all right.” Why not now?

Bess knew she was fighting a losing battle. She consented to the trip under one condition: Harry must drive no faster than fifty-five miles per hour. She always thought Harry drove too fast.

Harry agreed to Bess’s speed limit. The trip was on, and over the next several days he planned it as meticulously as if he were returning to Potsdam. Maps were spread out on the dining room table. The route was planned, the mileage calculated. “I took out the road map and figured the distance—exactly 1,050 miles from my garage door to the door of the Senate garage,” he wrote. “I decided on the best places to stop over on the way, as I always used to do.” He couldn’t have been happier. “I like to take trips—any kind of trip,” he wrote. “They are about the only recreation I have besides reading.”

The trip would not only give Harry a chance to satisfy his wanderlust. It was also part of his effort to make the transition, as he put it, from Mr. President to Mr. Citizen. Truman saw no reason why he shouldn’t go back to being “just anybody again.” “Cincinnatus knew when and how to lay down his great powers,” Truman wrote of the Roman general. “After he had saved the Republic he went back to his plow and became the good private citizen of his country.” But since his return to Independence, he’d found it difficult to escape his fame. Old friends were reluctant to call on him. Even Harry himself was having trouble adjusting, trouble becoming a “normal guy.” Stanley Fike, an aide to Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, remembered visiting the Trumans in their home shortly after they returned to Independence. “The president started to walk in front of a lady and Mrs. Truman said, ‘Harry, just a minute, let the lady go first.’ Of course, when he was president he always went first, this was the protocol. She was calling him back and reminding him that now he was a private citizen.”

“Up to this time, I had not had much luck at living like the plain ordinary citizen I had hoped to become on leaving the White House,” Harry wrote. “I thought that this holiday would give me a chance to do so at last.”

When Harry’s friends learned what he was up to, they were flabbergasted. “They organized a regular filibuster,” Harry remembered, “trying to talk me out of the trip.” But Harry could not be dissuaded. “I am kind of stubborn,” he explained, “and since no one could give me what I thought was a sensible reason why we should not go, we went.”

When Secret Service Director U. E. Baughman heard about the trip, a chill must have gone down his spine. It was one thing for the ex-president to drive himself to work. It was quite another for him to drive halfway across the country and back.

On September 13, 1899, a sixty-nine-year-old real estate agent named Henry Bliss stepped from a streetcar at 74th Street and Central Park West in New York City and was promptly flattened by an electric-powered taxi-cab. Bliss suffered massive head and chest injuries and died the next morning, becoming the first person killed in a motor vehicle accident in the United States.

Twenty-five more people would die in motor vehicle accidents before the end of 1899, and the number grew exponentially in the following years: 1,174 in 1909, 10,896 in 1919, 29,592 in 1929. In 1953, the one-millionth traffic fatality was recorded. That year, 36,190 people were killed in motor vehicle accidents in the United States. The fatality rate—the number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled—was 6.647. That was half the rate in 1937, but still considerably higher than today’s rate of less than 1.5.

Driving was dangerous because the cars were big but the safety features were not. For all its newfangled gadgets, Harry’s new forty-three-hundred-pound Chrysler didn’t even have seat belts. Major American automakers believed consumers would never pay for something so frivolous and wouldn’t equip their cars with seat belts until 1955, when Ford began offering them as an option on some models. That innovation was the brainchild of a young Ford executive named Robert McNamara—the future secretary of defense.

There were other factors involved as well: poor roads, lax enforcement of motor laws, a virtual lack of vehicle inspections, few if any driver education programs, the absence of speed limits on some roads. The problem was not unrecognized. Newspapers were filled with gruesome photographs depicting the aftermaths of violent collisions. As president, Truman himself had railed against “what amounts to murder on the road.” But the federal government was slow to respond. The predecessor of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would not be created until 1966. A year later, automakers were finally required by law to install seat belts as standard equipment.

So perhaps the greatest danger the Trumans would face on their trip would be the simple act of driving. It made U. E. Baughman wish the Secret Service could protect ex-presidents. But Congress wasn’t even willing to give them a pension, much less bodyguards. All Baughman could do was the same thing Harry’s friends would do: hope for the best.

Hannibal, Missouri,
June 19, 1953

O
n Friday, June 19, 1953, Harry skipped his morning constitutional and devoted himself to packing. He and Bess planned to hit the road that morning—and they would not travel light. Harry would fill the New Yorker with eleven suitcases before he was finished, the luggage spilling out of the trunk and onto the backseat. Most people hate packing, but Harry Truman, true to his obsessive nature, relished the task. “He prided himself on being an expert packer,” his daughter, Margaret, remembered, “and he was.”

Around 7:15, Harry and Bess climbed into the big black car. Harry slowly backed it through the narrow gate at the end of the driveway and onto Van Horn Road (soon to be renamed Truman Road). He had already scraped some chrome off the car backing through the gate, a process he likened to “the camel and the needle’s eye.” They drove the half-block up Van Horn, turned right onto Delaware Street, went about a mile, then turned right onto U.S. Highway 24. This they would follow 166 miles east to Monroe City, where they would pick up Highway 36.

A crude early version of air-conditioning was an option on the New Yorker in 1953, but Harry’s didn’t have it. (He never much saw the need for AC.) Missouri was in the grips of a heat wave, and the mercury would top 100 in much of the state that day. In Kansas City it hit 102. So the Trumans rode with the windows rolled all the way down, Harry with both hands on the wheel, Bess resting her elbow on the open window frame. They were, as usual, impeccably dressed: Harry wore a white suit, Bess a rayon print dress. Harry did make one small concession to the heat, however: he drove in his shirtsleeves, his jacket hanging from a hook above the left rear window.

As Independence faded in his rearview mirror, Harry Truman might have been the happiest man in Missouri, if not all forty-eight states. He loved to drive. Back when he was a county judge, he’d driven thousands of miles touring county courthouses from Colorado to New York before the construction of the new courthouse in Independence. When he ran for the Senate in 1934, he campaigned by car, crisscrossing the Show-Me State in his shiny new Plymouth. He enjoyed it so much, he said he felt like he was on vacation. As a senator, he drove thousands of miles investigating fraud and waste on military bases throughout the South and Midwest and, of course, he regularly drove between Independence and Washington. He always preferred the freedom of the road to the plush confines of a Pullman car. Even when he was president, he would occasionally take the wheel of his limo, much to the consternation of his Secret Service agents.

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.'”

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.”