Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (16 page)

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 binder 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.”

On Tuesday, June 23, Harry woke up early and took his usual morning walk—his first in Washington without Secret Service agents in more than eight years. At his usual brisk pace, he covered two miles in thirty minutes, walking along Connecticut Avenue and K Street. He never came within three blocks of the White House. Along the way, he was greeted by passersby, cabbies, truck drivers, and motorists: “Hello, Harry,” “Hello, Mr. President,” “Glad to see you back.”

Back at the hotel, Truman spent the day welcoming a string of visitors to his suite. One of his callers was the Iranian ambassador to the United States, Allah-Yar Saleh, who presented the former president with a Persian rug. The timing of the meeting is curious, for at that very moment the CIA was plotting to overthrow Saleh’s boss, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and return the shah to the Peacock Throne. The motive, of course, was oil. In 1951, Mossadegh announced plans to nationalize the country’s oilfields. This infuriated the British, who controlled Iran’s oil through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later known as British Petroleum, or BP). The British asked the Truman administration to help them remove Mossadegh. Truman, who was up to his eyeballs in Korea at the time, wasn’t interested—but his successor was. On April 4, 1953, Eisenhower’s director of central intelligence, Allen W. Dulles, signed off on an operation, code-named Ajax, to “bring about the fall of Mossadegh.” The agent in charge of the operation was Kermit Roosevelt—Theodore’s grandson. Iranians working for the agency and posing as communists harassed religious leaders to turn public opinion against Mossadegh. The CIA recruited an Iranian general to lead a coup. On August 19, 1953, demonstrators paid by the CIA attacked Mossadegh’s house. The resulting clashes killed three hundred people. Mossadegh fled, the general was installed as prime minister, and the shah returned to the throne. The British thanked the Americans by opening Iran to U.S. oil companies.

The CIA considered the coup a shining success and, in the ensuing years, it would inspire similar efforts to overthrow anti-American regimes in Guatemala and Cuba, with decidedly mixed results.

Mohammed Mossadegh was arrested and, after a show trial, sentenced to death. The shah commuted the sentence to three years’ imprisonment and house arrest for life. Allah-Yar Saleh, Mossadegh’s ambassador to the United States, returned to Iran and led the moderate opposition to the shah’s pro-Western government. The coup set the stage for the Islamic Revolution in 1979, not to mention generations of anti-American sentiment in Iran.

To Truman, the coup came to symbolize a larger problem: how the CIA, which he had organized in 1947, had been “diverted from its original assignment” of merely collecting intelligence. “It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government,” he wrote in 1963. “This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.”

The shah, for his part, would curry Truman’s favor for years, sending him Christmas cards every year and get-well cards when he got sick.

While Harry welcomed callers to his suite, Bess and Margaret attended a tea at the Women’s National Democratic Club. Bess wore a blue lace dress and a matching straw hat. She looked ten years younger, said one guest. She never looked happier, said another. Margaret, wearing a white silk dress with brown velvet trim, was asked if she and her parents planned to do any sightseeing in Washington. “Why go sightseeing in a place where you have lived nineteen years?” she said. “It hasn’t changed that much since January, has it?” She also denied rumors that Harry and Bess would do some house hunting when they visited her the following week in New York. “They are not going to live in New York or Long Island,” she said. “They are going back to Missouri—that’s home.” Margaret also denied reports of a new romantic interest. “No,” she sighed. “I am still looking.”

Also at the tea was another former first lady, Edith Bolling Wilson, the widow of Woodrow Wilson. It was a rare public appearance for Mrs. Wilson, who was eighty. When someone asked her what first ladies talked about when they got together, she just laughed and shook her head. (Besides Mmes. Truman and Wilson, two other former first ladies were alive at the time, Grace Coolidge and Eleanor Roosevelt.)