Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (11 page)

Indianapolis, Indiana,
June 20, 1953

E
ast of Decatur, Highway 36 passes through some serious farmland, land that is far too valuable to be covered with structures. It is striking just how few houses there are. The soil is dark, almost black, too fertile to waste on livestock, so there are no animals here, either. Driving across east-central Illinois in late June is like sailing across an ocean of soybeans and corn. The landscape is flat and utterly treeless. The road is impossibly straight. If my car (well, my dad’s car, actually) had been properly aligned, I could have put it on cruise control and taken a nap.

If anything, this place looks even more rural than it did when Harry and Bess passed through in 1953. Back then there were more than 164,000 farms in Illinois. Today there are half that number, though the amount of land being farmed is nearly the same. Chalk it up to technology. Modern machinery has made farming unthinkably productive. GPS guidance systems on tractors prevent overlap when plowing, planting, and harvesting, dramatically increasing efficiency. In 1990 one farm could feed 129 people. Today, one farm can feed 144. When farmers retire, their operations can easily be taken over by their neighbors. And, since they are retiring in droves—the average age of a farmer in Illinois is fifty-five—farms are consolidating rapidly.

With the possible exception of Jimmy Carter, Harry Truman was the last real farmer in the White House. In 1906, when he was twenty-two, Harry quit his job as a bank clerk in Kansas City and moved back to his family’s farm in Grandview because his father needed the help. Rising at five o’clock every morning, he worked twelve to fourteen hours a day. It was backbreaking labor. On six hundred acres, the Trumans grew wheat, corn, and potatoes and raised cattle, sheep, and hogs. Harry later said he “did everything there was to do” on the farm: “Plowed, sowed, reaped, milked cows, fed hogs, doctored horses, bailed [sic] hay.” With two plows attached to a team of four horses, he’d work maybe five acres in ten hours. “Riding one of these plows all day, day after day” he later wrote, “gives one time to think. I’ve settled all the ills of mankind in one way or another while riding along seeing that each animal pulled his part of the load.”

Harry didn’t leave the farm until he went off to war in 1917 at the age of thirty-three.

About thirty-five miles east of Decatur, Highway 36 passes the town of Bourbon. Now that must have brought a smile to Harry’s face. And a knowing look and maybe a sideways glance from Bess.

Around noon on Saturday, June 20, Harry guided the New Yorker into the driveway behind a grand Tudor home on Meridian Street in a fashionable neighborhood on the north side of Indianapolis. The Trumans were stopping for lunch at the home of Frank McKinney, Harry’s good friend and the former Democratic National Committee chairman.

Claire McKinney (now Claire McKinney Clark), the McKinneys’ daughter, said the former first couple’s arrival merited neither fanfare nor ceremony.

“My folks were normal, humble people and they didn’t get over-awed about things,” Clark said. “These were their friends coming to visit and it really wasn’t a big deal. We didn’t get lots of instructions on how to behave or what to do. Yes, he was the ex-president, but it wasn’t a big, big deal. And the fact that it wasn’t is a pretty good indication of what my parents were like.” And what their relationship with the Trumans was like.

Frank McKinney’s was a classic rags-to-riches story. Born to a German mother and an Irish father in a working-class (and solidly Democratic) neighborhood in south Indianapolis, McKinney quit school at fourteen to take a job as a messenger at Peoples State Bank. Five years later he was a teller. By the time he was thirty, he was the president.

McKinney’s rise in the Democratic Party was nearly as meteoric. In 1928, at twenty-four, he was appointed party treasurer in Indianapolis. Seven years later he was elected Marion County Treasurer, the only elected office he would ever hold. In 1940 he began working his way up the ranks of the DNC, beginning as vice chairman of the finance committee, until, in October 1951, Truman, who had met McKinney during the 1948 campaign, asked him to be national party chairman.

It was not an enviable offer. McKinney would be succeeding Bill Boyle, a friend of Truman’s from Kansas City who had been accused of receiving kickbacks for arranging government loans to businesses. (A Senate committee later cleared Boyle of any wrongdoing.) Meanwhile, the Truman administration was dogged by a scandal involving tax collectors accepting bribes, and the Democratic Party, which had split apart in 1948, was still not fully healed.

McKinney accepted the post, though he “had to be persuaded to take it,” Truman recalled. Although Boyle had been paid thirty-five thousand dollars annually, McKinney refused a salary, and he promised to rid the government of corrupt workers. “The only way to deal with termites is to keep a sharp watch for them and get rid of them whenever they show up,” he declared. He persuaded Truman to propose legislation making tax collectors civil service employees rather than political appointees. (Congress passed the bill.) McKinney also oversaw the party’s 1952 convention in Chicago, which was deemed a rousing success, if only because none of the delegates walked out as they had four years earlier. His reward, of course, was to get sacked by the nominee, Adlai Stevenson, who replaced McKinney after the convention with a friend and fellow Illini named Stephen Mitchell. “[Truman] always thought that Governor Stevenson made a mistake to replace him,” remembered Charles Murphy, a special counsel to the president. “And I think his view [was], that there was enough difference so if it had not happened Stevenson would have won the election.”

Harry and Bess with the McKinney family in front of the McKinney home in Indianapolis, June 20, 1953. From left: Bess, Frank McKinney, Frank McKinney Jr., Harry, Margaret McKinney, Claire McKinney.

It’s doubtful the firing of Frank McKinney cost Stevenson the election. Matthew Connelly, another Truman aide, said there wasn’t a Democrat alive who could have beaten Eisenhower in 1952. But McKinney’s work as DNC chairman clearly impressed Truman, and, despite a twenty-year difference in their ages, the two men grew quite close. They had much in common. Neither had attended college. Both were self-made, plain speaking, overachieving men from the Midwest, amateur historians who were accustomed to being underestimated.

After freshening up, the Trumans joined McKinney, his wife, Margaret, and their children, nineteen-year-old Claire and fourteen-year-old Frank Jr., at the family’s dining room table for a leisurely lunch: chilled melon balls, breast of chicken on ham, asparagus almondine, stuffed oranges, hot rolls and black currant preserves, and, for dessert, a McKinney family favorite, strawberry angel pie. Thelma Machael, the “women’s editor” of the
Indianapolis News,
reported that the Trumans “charmed the McKinneys’ daughter Claire and son Frank Jr. with their easy banter at the luncheon table, when Truman deferred to his wife as ‘the Boss.'”

“With friendly ease and professional aplomb,” Machael wrote, “the McKinneys hosted the luncheon visit in a manner as unflurried as if they were entertaining a group of their children’s friends.”

After lunch, the party retired to the porch to relax. The temperature hit one hundred degrees in Indianapolis that day, a new record for the date, but Harry Truman could stand the heat anywhere, not just in the kitchen. Dressed in a dark blue gabardine suit with a light blue shirt and polka dot bow tie, he betrayed not a hint of discomfort. Neither, for that matter, did Bess, who, Thelma Machael reported in remarkable detail, “wore a silk print jacket dress with a minute turquoise and purple design scattered over the black silk, relieved with a touch of white at the throat and mid arm.” A handful of newspaper reporters and photographers who’d caught wind of the visit were waiting out on the sidewalk. Truman, who had practically invented the modern presidential press conference, couldn’t resist inviting them up to the porch.

“Well-fed, and beaming with good humor,”
Time
magazine reported, “Harry Truman met the press, felt the cloth of a reporter’s cord suit and allowed as how he had one just like it.” He didn’t want to say anything about Eisenhower—he was saving that for his speech in Philadelphia. He also didn’t want to comment on the ongoing Korean cease-fire negotiations. But he answered a host of other questions with his usual mix of candor and humor.

Was he optimistic or pessimistic about world affairs in general? a reporter asked.

“I always have been optimistic that the peace of the world can be reached and maintained,” answered Truman.

“In our time?”

“I am not a prophet.”

Asked about rumors that his friend McKinney might be returned to his post as Democratic Party chairman, Truman enthusiastically endorsed the idea. “Frank’s the best chairman the party ever had,” he said, a not-so-subtle swipe at the incumbent, Stephen Mitchell (not to mention Adlai Stevenson). “Of course,” he added, seeming to catch himself, “the present chairman was duly elected and all that.”

Would he support Stevenson if he ran again in 1956? Truman said he was for “no candidate” at the moment, but “when the time comes, I’ll make my sentiments known.” But he promised to campaign for any candidate the Democrats nominated. “The Democratic Party has been very good to me,” he said. “It has done all for me it could do for any one man. I am very grateful.”

Would he consider running for office himself again? Truman’s ambiguous answer seemed to leave the door open. He said he was busy with other things at the moment, but he was still interested in politics, of course. What about Margaret? Will she run for office? “She’s over twenty-one,” he said, smiling, “and can do what she wants to.” (Privately, he joked that Margaret couldn’t run for Congress because “she’d never be able to get up early enough in the morning.”)

Truman just seemed to be getting warmed up when McKinney cut him off. “If you’re going to get across Ohio today,” McKinney said, “you’d better be on the way.” Truman concurred, ending the press conference.

Bess also granted an interview on the porch that day. That was exceptionally rare, because she guarded her privacy fiercely. When she became first lady, she steadfastly refused to grant interviews or hold press conferences. When in the fall of 1947 she finally consented to answer questions from reporters, the questions had to be submitted in writing—and her answers were hardly revealing:

Since she declined to engage the press, the public never really got to know Bess Truman. Her image was that of a dowdy, slightly dour housewife. Nothing could have been further from the truth. “She was full of charm,” remembered journalist Charles Robbins, “with a repressed girlish mischievousness and a dry wit that quickly let the air out of pretense and righted departures from common sense.”

That she submitted to questions on the McKinneys’ porch in Indianapolis was, as Thelma Machael put it in the
Indianapolis News,
indicative of “the deep enjoyment of her present semiprivate life.”

“Her gestures are restrained,” Machael wrote of Bess on the porch that afternoon, “her laughter soft and sincere and her carriage erect.”

The ex-president, Bess reported, was easy to cook for—except for just one thing: “I don’t dare serve onions in any form.” His favorite meal? Steak with buttered baked potatoes. “Goodness, that man can’t put enough butter on baked potatoes!”