Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [6]
After lunch, the Trumans stopped by the home of Harry’s longtime personal secretary, Matthew Connelly, where Harry took his customary afternoon nap. Around 4:00 P.M., they were driven to Union Station to catch the train back home to Independence.
At the station, Harry and Bess bade farewell to their Secret Service detail. Just as they received no pensions, ex-presidents at that time received no government-financed bodyguards. The Trumans were no longer, in Secret Service parlance, protectees. They were on their own now.
As president, Harry often took walks around Washington. Here he is in 1950, walking from his temporary home in the Blair House to the White House, accompanied by Secret Service agents. (The White House was being renovated at the time.)
The Trumans would ride home in the presidential railcar, the Ferdinand Magellan, which was attached to the end of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s regular National Limited. Truman had undertaken his historic whistle-stop campaign on board the Ferdinand Magellan in 1948. The car was now at Eisenhower’s disposal, of course, but the new president had offered it to the Trumans in an effort to mend fences. Truman appreciated the gesture, but for the time being, anyway, he kept the hatchet very much unburied.
Unexpectedly, a crowd of over three thousand had gathered at Union Station to see the Trumans off: senators, members of Congress, supreme court justices, generals, admirals, old friends, foreign diplomats, ordinary Washingtonians. They sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and “Auld Lang Syne.” “Good-bye, Mr. President,” they shouted. “Good-bye, Harry!” Many wept. Said prim Dean Acheson with uncharacteristic folksiness, “We’re saying good-bye to the greatest guy that ever was.” The Trumans were deeply moved by the impromptu going away party. “I can’t adequately express my appreciation for what you are doing,” Harry told the crowd from the rear platform of the Ferdinand Magellan. “I’ll never forget it if I live to be a hundred—and that’s just what I intend to do!” At six-thirty, the valves underneath the train hissed and the conductor called out, “All aboard.” As the train slowly pulled out of the station, Harry and Bess stood waving from the back platform. They seemed reluctant for the moment to end. They kept waving as the train disappeared into the Washington night. “They’ve gone back to Missouri,” a porter said wistfully as he watched the couple fade into darkness.
The twenty-six-hour ride home was reminiscent of the whistle-stop campaign. At each stop along the way, great crowds came out to say farewell to their erstwhile president. “Crowd at Silver Spring, Md., some three or four hundred,” wrote Truman in his diary. “Crowd at Harpers Ferry, Grafton, and it was reported to me at every stop all night long. Same way across Indiana and Illinois.” The outpouring was touching. It was also surprising, because Harry Truman was not very popular when he left the White House, mainly due to the stalemate in Korea. In 1952 his approval rating in a Gallup Poll had sunk to 22 percent—a record low unmatched until 2008. On the eve of his departure, newspaper columnist Walter Trohan called Truman “one of the most mediocre men ever to inherit power…. Our Harry has rattled around in the White House like a peanut in a ball room and has floundered in the president’s chair.” Yet, as the outpouring of affection on the trip home attested, many Americans were beginning to realize just what they were losing.
Several times on the ride home Truman left the Ferdinand Magellan to stroll through the rest of the train, stopping frequently to chat with passengers. It was something he hadn’t been able to do in eight years, to move about as he wished, unencumbered by Secret Service agents. When he walked into one car and the passengers began to rise in deference, Truman stopped them. “Don’t get up,” he said. “I’m no longer president.”
At 7:15 on the morning after the inauguration—Truman’s first full day as ex-president—the train stopped for a