Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [33]
“My folks were normal, humble people and they didn’t get over-awed about things,” Clark said. “These were their friends coming to visit and it really wasn’t a big deal. We didn’t get lots of instructions on how to behave or what to do. Yes, he was the ex-president, but it wasn’t a big, big deal. And the fact that it wasn’t is a pretty good indication of what my parents were like.” And what their relationship with the Trumans was like.
Frank McKinney’s was a classic rags-to-riches story. Born to a German mother and an Irish father in a working-class (and solidly Democratic) neighborhood in south Indianapolis, McKinney quit school at fourteen to take a job as a messenger at Peoples State Bank. Five years later he was a teller. By the time he was thirty, he was the president.
McKinney’s rise in the Democratic Party was nearly as meteoric. In 1928, at twenty-four, he was appointed party treasurer in Indianapolis. Seven years later he was elected Marion County Treasurer, the only elected office he would ever hold. In 1940 he began working his way up the ranks of the DNC, beginning as vice chairman of the finance committee, until, in October 1951, Truman, who had met McKinney during the 1948 campaign, asked him to be national party chairman.
It was not an enviable offer. McKinney would be succeeding Bill Boyle, a friend of Truman’s from Kansas City who had been accused of receiving kickbacks for arranging government loans to businesses. (A Senate committee later cleared Boyle of any wrongdoing.) Meanwhile, the Truman administration was dogged by a scandal involving tax collectors accepting bribes, and the Democratic Party, which had split apart in 1948, was still not fully healed.
McKinney accepted the post, though he “had to be persuaded to take it,” Truman recalled. Although Boyle had been paid thirty-five thousand dollars annually, McKinney refused a salary, and he promised to rid the government of corrupt workers. “The only way to deal with termites is to keep a sharp watch for them and get rid of them whenever they show up,” he declared. He persuaded Truman to propose legislation making tax collectors civil service employees rather than political appointees. (Congress passed the bill.) McKinney also oversaw the party’s 1952 convention in Chicago, which was deemed a rousing success, if only because none of the delegates walked out as they had four years earlier. His reward, of course, was to get sacked by the nominee, Adlai Stevenson, who replaced McKinney after the convention with a friend and fellow Illini named Stephen Mitchell. “[Truman] always thought that Governor Stevenson made a mistake to replace him,” remembered Charles Murphy, a special counsel to the president. “And I think his view [was], that there was enough difference so if it had not happened Stevenson would have won the election.”
Harry and Bess with the McKinney family in front of the McKinney home in Indianapolis, June 20, 1953. From left: Bess, Frank McKinney, Frank McKinney Jr., Harry, Margaret McKinney, Claire McKinney.
It’s doubtful the firing of Frank McKinney cost Stevenson the election. Matthew Connelly, another Truman aide, said there wasn’t a Democrat alive who could have beaten Eisenhower in 1952. But McKinney’s work as DNC chairman clearly impressed Truman, and, despite a twenty-year difference in their ages, the two men grew quite close. They had much in common. Neither had attended college. Both were self-made, plain speaking, overachieving men from the Midwest, amateur historians who were accustomed to being underestimated.
After freshening up, the Trumans joined McKinney, his wife, Margaret, and their children, nineteen-year-old Claire and fourteen-year-old Frank Jr., at the family’s dining room table for a leisurely lunch: chilled melon balls, breast of chicken on ham, asparagus almondine, stuffed oranges, hot rolls and black currant preserves, and, for dessert, a McKinney family favorite, strawberry angel pie. Thelma Machael, the “women’s editor” of the