Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [56]
A cartoon on the front page of the Washington Star depicted Harry as a tourist, a travel guide in his back pocket and camera in hand, standing on the sidewalk, peering at the White House through the iron gate. It greatly amused Truman, who once described the White House as a “prison.” “I’d much rather be on the outside looking in than on the inside looking out,” he joked.
“The friendly quality that was so much a part of the Truman family during their years in Senate life and later in the White House was still with them during their recent visit here,” said an editorial in the Star (which had endorsed Dewey in 1948). “It was good to have them back. They looked fine, and it’s nice to know they’re happy and enjoying life. One hopes that they’ll make a habit of dropping into town from time to time. Old friends are always welcome.”
Not everybody was so welcoming. Harry’s old enemies on the right couldn’t abide his carefree return to Washington. “Harry S. can stroll blithely around the nation’s capital, without a care in the world, secretly hugging himself with glee,” wrote the newspaper columnist George Dixon, who noted that Truman had run up a budget deficit of better than six billion dollars in the final year of his administration. “He did the dancing, but Dwight D. has to pay the piper.”
But Harry didn’t give a damn what George Dixon or any of his ilk thought. He had the time of his life on his first trip back to the capital. “As soon as we arrived in Washington,” Harry wrote, “the calendar seemed to have been turned back a year…. It seemed like a dream to relive such an experience. For one solid week, the illusion of those other days in Washington was maintained perfectly. The suite we stayed in at the Mayflower could have been the White House; many of the visitors were the same. Everything seemed just as it used to be—the taxi drivers shouting hello along the line of my morning walks, the dinners at night with the men and women I had worked with for years, the conferences, the tension, the excitement, the feeling of things happening and going to happen—all the same. I was deeply moved by the spontaneous expression of good will shown me.”
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9
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
June 26–27, 1953
On the afternoon of Friday, June 26, Harry took the train to Philadelphia. He rode in a private railcar loaned to him by the Pennsylvania Railroad, another “favor” that the former president gladly accepted. Bess and Margaret, meanwhile, drove ahead to New York City in the Chrysler. Harry would meet them there after his speech.
Philadelphia played a pivotal role in Truman’s political career. It was the site of the 1948 Democratic National Convention, where Truman roused languid delegates in a sweltering auditorium with a characteristically pugnacious acceptance speech: “… I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don’t you forget that!” It was the opening salvo of the whistle-stop campaign.
Five years later, almost to the day, Truman was returning to Philadelphia to deliver the first major speech of his post-presidency.
At 4:12 P.M. his train pulled into 30th Street Station, where he was greeted by a delegation of city officials as well as a contingent from the Reserve Officers Association. Dressed in a blue summer suit and a Panama hat, the former president looked relaxed and jovial. He was driven to the Warwick Hotel, where he took a nap. Then he was driven several blocks to the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, the site of the Reserve Officers Association’s twenty-seventh annual convention.
Standing in a receiving line before dinner, Truman, now donning a white dinner jacket and black bow tie, greeted another member of the Reserve Officers Association who, like Truman, was a colonel in the army reserves: J. Strom Thurmond, former governor of South Carolina and erstwhile presidential candidate. Back in 1948, Thurmond had bolted the Democratic Party to protest its civil rights platform. “There’s not enough troops in the army to break down segregation and admit the Negro into our homes, our eating places,