Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [3]
Truman and Eisenhower had even had a hat spat: Eisenhower wanted to wear a homburg to his swearing in. Truman thought the occasion befitted a more formal top hat, but, conceding it was Ike’s prerogative to choose the headgear for his inauguration, he wore a homburg. (John F. Kennedy would turn the tables on Eisenhower eight years later. JFK donned a silk top hat, forcing Ike to wear one too. Since then the presidential hat wars have abated markedly.)
At eleven-thirty, the president-elect’s limousine finally pulled up to the White House. Ike sent word inside that he and Mamie would not be joining the Trumans for coffee. Tradition be damned: Ike didn’t want to step foot inside the executive mansion until he was the executive. It was a snub, plain and simple, a “shocking moment,” according to the newsman Eric Sevareid, who was there. Truman was furious, but he walked outside and greeted Eisenhower with all the faux warmth he could muster. “Truman was gracious,” Sevareid told Truman biographer David McCullough. “He showed his superiority by what he did.”
Truman joined Eisenhower in an open limousine, a huge black Lincoln, for the short ride to the Capitol. Their wives (and the Trumans’ daughter, Margaret) rode behind them in a separate car. Truman and Eisenhower smiled and waved to the crowds lining Pennsylvania Avenue, but barely spoke to each other.
After a ride that must have seemed much longer than the two miles it actually was, the limousine pulled up to the east side of the Capitol, where a temporary platform had been constructed for the inauguration ceremonies. Truman climbed up to the dais and was seated in a plush leather chair just behind the podium.
Bess, Harry, and Margaret Truman, photographed in 1953. Harry called Bess “the Boss.” Margaret was “the Boss’s Boss.”
Eisenhower’s running mate, Richard Nixon, was sworn in first. While repeating the oath, Nixon failed to repeat the word support when he was supposed to swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The omission was barely noticed. At twelve-thirty—a half-hour late—Eisenhower was sworn in by Chief Justice Fred Vinson. (Vinson had been appointed by Truman, and he is still the last chief justice appointed by a Democrat.) Eisenhower was now president of the United States. Truman, as he had put it in his farewell address five days earlier, was now “a plain, private citizen.”
After a brief prayer, Eisenhower began his inaugural address. “My fellow citizens,” he intoned. “The world and we have passed the midway point of a century of continuing challenge. We sense with all our faculties that forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history….”
Truman slumped in his chair ever so slightly. He later admitted he’d found it difficult to focus on Eisenhower’s words. His mind began to wander. Perhaps his thoughts turned back to the summer of 1922. Back then—a little more than thirty years earlier—he was thirty-eight, married just three years, and living in his mother-in-law’s house in Independence, Missouri. The haberdashery that he had opened with his friend Eddie Jacobson in nearby Kansas City had failed earlier that year, and it would take him fifteen years to pay off the debts. He was, for all intents and purposes, unemployed. “Broke and in a bad way”—that’s how Harry summed up that summer many years later.
It was an old army buddy named Jimmy Pendergast