Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [47]
And he did it all right under Eisenhower’s nose. The White House, Robbins said, “maintained a tomblike silence” while Harry was in town.
At the time, there was a rumor going around Washington that Truman would run for president again in 1956, with Adlai Stevenson as his running mate—or, perhaps, vice versa. Truman insisted he wasn’t interested in running for anything, but, judging by the way he behaved on his return to the capital, it was hard to believe him.
No hotel has played a more important role in American politics than the Mayflower. Just two weeks after it opened in 1925, it hosted an inaugural ball for Calvin Coolidge (which the famously reticent president did not attend). Herbert Hoover lived at the hotel between his election and inauguration, as did FDR, who wrote his first inaugural address in suite 776. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his longtime aide Clyde Tolson ate lunch side by side in the hotel’s Town & Country Lounge nearly every day for twenty years. Queen Elizabeth and Winston Churchill stayed there. So did the Chinese delegation negotiating détente with the Nixon administration in 1973. Gerald Ford was offered the vice presidency there.
Harry Truman liked the Mayflower. As vice president, he once sat in with the hotel’s band. “He played piano with us (The Fairy Waltz, Chopsticks, etc.) and it was very cozy,” the Mayflower’s bandleader, Sidney Seidenman, wrote in a letter to his son, who was in the army at the time. “He seems a very swell guy. I don’t suppose the German Vice Presidential equivalent would go around playing piano with the likes of me, now, would he?” In a 1948 speech at the hotel, Truman declared his candidacy for election to the presidency in his own right. (“I want to say that during the next four years there will be a Democrat in the White House, and you are looking at him!”) The following January, he celebrated his inauguration there. That was an especially joyous event for Truman, who had, of course, been unable to celebrate his ascension to the presidency theretofore. The Mayflower, he said, was “Washington’s second-best address,” a phrase that now appears on T-shirts sold in the hotel’s gift shop.
What you won’t find in the gift shop is any mention of the hotel’s role in some of Washington’s most salacious political scandals. If the Mayflower’s walls could talk, they would have been subpoenaed—or bought off—a long, long time ago.
Kennedy’s alleged mistress, Judith Exner, kept a room at the hotel, and JFK is said to have met Angie Dickinson at the Mayflower for more than drinks. A former girlfriend of Washington Mayor Marion Barry testified that she smoked crack with him at the Mayflower in 1989. (That infamous undercover video, however—“Bitch set me up!”—was shot across town at the Vista.) Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky were famously photographed embracing at a campaign event at the Mayflower in 1996, and, three years later, Lewinsky was interviewed in the hotel’s presidential suite by House investigators trying to impeach the president.
More recently, on February 13, 2008, New York governor Eliot Spitzer (aka client 9) met a call girl named “Kristen” in room 871. That tryst would cost Spitzer forty-three hundred dollars and his political career.
On Monday morning, Bess and Margaret went out to do some shopping while Harry and a group of his old advisors convened in his suite to put the finishing touches on the speech he would deliver in Philadelphia later that week. The first draft had been prepared by David Lloyd, his White House speechwriter. “It was a lively exegetical