Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [30]
Ethel did not die as easily as Julius. She was a short woman, and the chair, known as Old Sparky, was built for an average-sized man. The helmet and straps were too large for her, so the electrodes, apparently, made poor contact with her body. It took three applications of current over five minutes to kill her. Witnesses reported seeing smoke rising from her head. At 7:16 she was finally pronounced dead. Fifteen minutes later, the last rays of the setting sun disappeared behind the horizon at Sing Sing, signaling the beginning of the Sabbath. The Rosenbergs remain the only American civilians ever executed for espionage. For fear of being ostracized, no close relatives were willing to take in Michael and Robert Rosenberg. After a stint in an orphanage, the children were adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol. Abel Meeropol was a liberal activist and songwriter who, under the pseudonym Lewis Allen, wrote “Strange Fruit,” the classic anti-lynching anthem made famous by Billie Holiday.
About forty-five minutes after Ethel Rosenberg was pronounced dead, Harry and Bess Truman emerged from their motel room, appearing, according to one account, “much refreshed.” The reporters camped outside his door asked the former president to comment on the executions. His reply was enigmatic: “My actions in the Rosenberg case speak for themselves.” In fact, Harry Truman had taken no actions in the case.
In any event, it was time for dinner. Harry and Bess drove to Grove’s, a popular diner in a long, low-slung building on the north side of Decatur. A police car led the way, and several cars filled with reporters and gawkers followed the Trumans, forming an impromptu motorcade. It was not the kind of inconspicuous outing that Harry had hoped for.
The diner fell silent when the Trumans entered. Every eye in the place followed them as they were seated at a table with their unwanted bodyguards, Francis Hartnett and Horace Hoff. Harry ordered roast beef, potatoes, and salad. Bess ordered the same thing. They ate under the constant gaze of their fellow diners, which seemed to make Bess, at least, uncomfortable. “Mrs. Truman spoke in low tones to her husband during their meal,” reported the appropriately named Harold Stalker in the Decatur Herald. “[She] glanced around occasionally when she noticed that they were attracting attention in the café.” They didn’t stay for dessert. The bill came to $1.72. Harry also picked up the tab for the two cops. As Truman walked back to his car, Stalker attempted to interview him but was cut off. “There’s nothing to be said of importance anyway right now,” Truman snapped, clearly growing a little weary of the constant attention in Decatur.
Grove’s is gone, but another restaurant now stands in its place—a McDonald’s. Nothing distinguishes it from the other thirty thousand McDonald’s in the world. I stopped in for a cup of coffee, taking a seat in a booth with my copy of that day’s Decatur Herald & Review (“Decatur Man Breaks Record for Weight Lifted at His Age”). In the booth behind me sat a woman roughly the same age Bess was when she and Harry came to this very spot more than fifty years earlier. The woman was sitting alone, talking on a cell phone—not in the low tones of Bess, but very loudly—about a doctor’s appointment she’d had that morning. “They found another lump below my thyroid,” she announced, oblivious to her fellow diners. “But he don’t think it’s cancer ‘cause it’s not hard.”
It made me wonder what Harry Truman would think of cell phones. A nineteenth-century man stuck in the twentieth, Harry was a bit of a Luddite. He didn’t like using the telephone. He wrote letters instead. And he wrote them in longhand, with a distinctive slashing script. Even the typewriter was a technology he could not bring himself to adopt.
The cell phone would not be suited to Harry’s personality.