Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [48]
At noon, Truman went to the Capitol for lunch with Democratic members of Missouri’s congressional delegation. He went by limousine. The Packard Motor Car Company had offered him the use of a brand-new eighty-five-hundred-dollar limo while he was in Washington. (The company also provided a “smartly uniformed” chauffeur.) The limousine was identical to two that the company had recently delivered to the White House for President Eisenhower’s use.
“We shipped this car down from Detroit for the use of Mr. Truman as a courtesy,” explained Donald C. Jeffrey, Packard’s manager of government sales. “We don’t play sides.” Truman, who was probably a little tired of driving anyway, gladly took the company up on its offer. His Chrysler would spend the rest of the week in the Mayflower garage.
At lunch, Truman told his fellow Missouri Democrats that their party was “on the comeback trail.” He said farmers back home were organizing “Never Again” clubs, promising to never again vote Republican. “We gave them three-hundred-dollar cows,” he said, “now they’ve got thirty-dollar Eisenhower calves.”
Walking back to the limousine after lunch, Truman was mobbed outside the Capitol by tourists who had come to see the sights, never expecting to see one in the flesh. They crowded close around him, jostling for position, begging for an autograph or a handshake or a snapshot. As was his policy, he patiently obliged every request. Once, when asked how he coped with such onslaughts, Truman laughed and said he tried to put himself in other people’s shoes and imagine how he would feel “if some supposed bigshot high-hatted me.”
Occasionally, however, his patience was tested. At a college basketball tournament in Kansas City, about three hundred autograph seekers rushed his box when he and Bess were introduced over the public address system. Even after it was announced that he would give no autographs while the game was in progress, “the more rugged members of the crowd” continued to pester him with their requests. “We never saw the finish of the game,” he remembered. “Our host lost his nerve and smuggled us out with five minutes left to go.”
On the way back to the Mayflower in his limousine, Truman spotted his good friend and erstwhile secretary of state, the debonair Dean Acheson, walking alone along 17th Street NW. Truman had his driver honk the horn repeatedly, but Acheson, lost in thought, paid no attention. Finally the limo pulled up alongside him. Truman stuck his head out the window. “You’re the hardest pickup I ever encountered,” he said. For five minutes the former president and his former secretary of state chatted casually on a Washington sidewalk, just like old friends, which they were. Acheson asked Truman about the drive from Independence. “Had a governor on the seat with me,” Harry said, referring to Bess as a speed-regulation device. “Had it up to seventy a few times, but she’d always pull me in.”
That night the Trumans attended a cookout at Clark Clifford’s house. Clifford had been Harry’s White House counsel and would go on to advise three more Democratic presidents, becoming the ultimate Washington insider. He and his wife, Marny, lived in an antebellum farmhouse on Rockville Pike in Bethesda, Maryland.
It was a typical American barbecue in every way—save for the guest list. Besides the former president and first lady, Chief Justice Fred Vinson and his wife were among the twenty-two high-powered attendees.
Cocktails preceded dinner. Clifford, wearing an apron, cooked the steaks himself on a charcoal grill on the patio. The guests ate at tables set up in the Cliffords’ sprawling backyard. It was, Bess Truman later wrote, the happiest evening she and Harry had spent in a long, long time.
At the cookout,