Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (26 page)

Franklin Roosevelt was the first president to fly in office when he took a Boeing 314 Clipper Ship to the Casablanca Conference in 1943. Named the
Dixie Clipper,
the plane was operated by Pan American Airways. After Casablanca, military leaders thought better of having their commander in chief fly commercial again, so the Army Air Forces specially modified a C-54 transport plane for Roosevelt and delivered it to him in 1944. Nicknamed the
Sacred Cow
by either the White House press corps or AAF personnel, the plane featured a small elevator behind the passenger cabin to make it easier for the president to get on and off the plane in his wheelchair.

Roosevelt used the plane just once, to attend the Yalta Conference in February 1945. When Truman became president, he inherited the
Sacred Cow
and, on June 19, 1945, a little more than two months after taking office, he flew to Olympia, Washington, on the plane. It was the first domestic flight in the history of the presidency.

Whenever he flew, Harry liked to hang out in the cockpit and chat with the crew. He also liked to have a little fun. The plane’s pilot, Lt. Col. Henry Myers, said the president asked to be notified whenever the
Sacred Cow
flew over Ohio, the home state of Truman’s nemesis in the Senate, Robert Taft. In
The Flying White House,
J. F. terHorst and Ralph Albertazzie explained why:

By late 1946, the
Sacred Cow
was already showing its age, so the air force decided to replace it with a Douglas DC-6, the most advanced longrange airliner then in production. The new plane was even more luxurious than the
Sacred Cow.
Mounted on the wall of the stateroom were instruments—a compass, an altimeter, and a speedometer—that the president could monitor in flight. Powered by four 2,400-horsepower prop engines, it had a cruising speed of 320 miles per hour and a range of 4,400 miles. (The
Sacred Cow,
by comparison, had a cruising speed of 245 miles per hour and a range of 3,900 miles.) The new plane was also equipped with the most modern communications equipment, including a teletype system that could send and receive coded messages. It seemed to have everything—except a name.

The White House and the air force had always hated the name
Sacred
Cow, which they regarded as undignified. Truman’s press secretary, Charles Ross, never failed to point out that
“Sacred Cow
was a nickname for which the White House had no responsibility.” According to Ross, Truman simply called the plane “the C-54.” The air force wanted to call the new presidential plane the
Flying White House,
or simply refer to it by its air force number (46–505). But Henry Myers, the pilot, suggested the
Independence,
a name that evoked the nation’s history and ideals. Of course, it also happened to be the name of the president’s hometown. The air force didn’t care for the name, but Harry liked it, and that was all that really mattered.

The most striking thing about the
Independence
was its two-tone blue paint scheme. While the
Sacred Cow
looked like every other C-54 (on the outside anyway), its replacement was painted to look like an eagle. The nose was the beak, and the cockpit windows were the eyes. Stylized feathers swept down the fuselage. Douglas Aircraft had come up with the design for American Airlines, whose logo was an eagle. American rejected it, but air force officials who happened to see the design thought it would be perfect for the new presidential plane. The
Independence
looked unlike any other plane in the world. It was flashy, and Harry loved it.

The
Independence
was officially commissioned on the Fourth of July in 1947. Two months later, Harry, Bess, and Margaret flew it to a conference in Rio de Janeiro. On the way home, Harry played a practical joke on Bess, whose fear of flying was well known. The plane had reversible propellers, a new technology that made it possible to land on short runways. Before landing in Belem, Brazil, pilot Henry Myers told Harry that he would have to use the reversible props, and that they would make a lot of noise. “I reminded him especially to warn Mrs. Truman in advance,” Myers remembered. “I knew it would worry her otherwise.”

But Harry said nothing to Bess.

The plane landed. Bess heard the strange noise.

“Oh, my, what’s happening?” she said.

Harry looked out the window and shouted, “The plane’s falling apart!

The
independence
was Harry’s second presidential airplane. Its unusual paint scheme was originally designed for American Airlines. Today the plane is on display at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.

But Bess could always tell when Harry was pulling her leg.

“If that’s all that happens when this thing falls apart,” she said nonchalantly, “then it’s not as bad as I expected.”

The
Independence
made its most famous presidential flight in October 1950, when it flew Truman to Wake Island for his historic meeting with Douglas MacArthur. In all, Truman flew more than 135,000 miles on sixty-one trips during his presidency.

When Eisenhower took office in 1953, he didn’t want Harry’s hand-me-down airplane. He ordered a new one, a Lockheed Constellation, which he dubbed
Columbine II.
(The plane he had used as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe had been named
Columbine,
after the official flower of Mamie Eisenhower’s home state of Colorado.) Later that year, Eisenhower’s plane, which went by the call sign “Air Force 8610,” found itself in the same airspace as Eastern Airlines flight number 8610. The resulting confusion prompted the air force to designate any plane carrying the president “Air Force One.” The named presidential airplane went the way of the named highway.

After they were retired from presidential service, both the
Sacred Cow
and the
Independence
continued to be used by high-ranking military and government officials. The
Independence,
in fact, made a brief cameo as Air Force One. On April 27, 1961, with his regular plane undergoing maintenance, President Kennedy flew the
Independence
from Washington to New York. On board, Kennedy marveled at the quaint instruments on the wall of the stateroom.

The
Sacred Cow
was permanently retired in 1961, the
Independence
four years later. Both planes are now on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson, along with several other presidential airplanes, including the Boeing 707 that flew Kennedy to Dallas on November 22, 1963 (and returned his body to Washington that same day).

The presidential airplanes are stored in a hangar separate from the main museum, so visitors have to take a shuttle bus to see them. My lovely wife and I happened to be visiting in early February, which, based on our experience, is not the peak tourist season in southwestern Ohio. Apart from the driver and a chaperone (it being a military base, after all), we were the only two people on the bus, which was fine with us, because we had the run of the place.

The
Sacred Cow
and the
Independence
have been restored to their original appearance inside and out, and you can actually walk through them, though everything inside is walled off with Plexiglas, leaving a narrow passageway that claustrophobics are wise to avoid. (We were told that larger visitors have been known to get stuck.) Seated in the stateroom of the
Sacred Cow
is a mannequin of FDR in a tuxedo, looking a bit like he’s waiting for somebody to bring him a drink. A replica of his wheelchair is parked near the elevator specially installed for him.

Inside the
Independence
there’s a mannequin of Harry sitting at a small table in the main compartment, but it’s not a very good likeness. He’s too skinny and his clothes don’t seem to fit. The jacket is too small. If the real Harry saw it, he’d be mortified. But his eyes would brighten at the sight of the newspaper lying on the table in front of the mannequin. It’s a copy of
Stars and Stripes
with the banner headline “MacArthur Relieved of Command.” Farther down the narrow Plexiglas corridor is a small room marked “Presidential Dressing Area/Lavatory.” It must have disappointed Harry that the
Independence,
unlike the
Sacred Cow,
could not discharge its waste in flight.

There’s another sight at Wright-Patterson that is connected to Truman, though it is very much off-limits to the public. The remains of crashed UFOs and their occupants are stored inside the secret “Blue Room” in Hangar 18. Or so the story goes. It makes sense, in a way, since Wright-Patterson is where Project Blue Book was based. (Though, it must be noted, Blue Book concluded that there was “no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ were extraterrestrial vehicles.”) Supposedly the debris from Roswell was taken to the Blue Room where, according to some of the wilder accounts, it was personally inspected by Truman. That’s highly doubtful. Even the president would have had difficulty gaining entrance to the Blue Room. “I once asked General Curtis LeMay if I could get into that room,” Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater told the
New Yorker
in 1988, “and he just gave me holy hell. He said, ‘Not only can’t you get into it but don’t you ever mention it to me again.'”

On the shuttle bus to the presidential planes hangar, I asked our chaperone, half-jokingly, if it would be possible to see Hangar 18, too. All he would say is, “They don’t want us to talk about that.”

Richmond, Indiana,
July 7, 1953

O
n the morning of Tuesday, July 7, Ora Wilson, the sheriff of Wayne County, Indiana, got a call from a friend at the Ohio State Highway Patrol. His friend advised Wilson that Harry and Bess Truman were headed his way, and helpfully supplied a description of their vehicle and an ETA. Like Glenn Kerwin, the police chief in Decatur, Illinois, Ora Wilson was anxious to “look after” the Trumans while they were in his jurisdiction. He also wanted to get his picture in the paper. So he recruited one of his deputies—his son Lowell—to help spring a trap for the Trumans. Father and son sat in a cruiser parked on the east side of Richmond, the county seat, and waited to intercept the couple as soon as they came into town. In the backseat was a photographer for the
Richmond Palladium-Item.

Richmond, Indiana, population forty thousand, sits on the banks of the Whitewater River, just across the Ohio border. Founded by Quakers in 1806, it was a center of the abolitionist movement. The Wright Brothers grew up here, and Wilbur attended Richmond High School before the family moved to Dayton. It’s also where the Reverend Jim Jones, founder of the Peoples Temple, went to high school. But Richmond’s two enduring claims to fame are curiously paradoxical: in the 1920s, the city played a key role in the rise of both the Ku Klux Klan and African American music.

During the Roaring Twenties, the Klan enjoyed a resurgence known as the second wave, exploiting white anxiety over the influx of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the mass migration of African Americans from the South to the North. In 1924 there were four million active Klan members, including some five hundred thousand in Indiana—the largest single state contingent. In Richmond roughly half the city’s adult white males belonged to the Klan, including the mayor, the county sheriff, and the county prosecutor. On the evening of Friday, October 5, 1923, the Klan staged a spectacular parade through Richmond. It featured more than six thousand hooded and robed Klansmen, as well as marching bands, floats, and, of course, many “fiery crosses.” In “magnitude and impressiveness,” the
Richmond Palladium-Item
reported the next day, the parade “has had few equals in this city.”