Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [17]
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