Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [63]
Truman was startled by the cabbie’s effusiveness. He took a step back, smiling. “You embarrass me,” he said.
From Madison he turned east onto 48th Street, then north on Park Avenue back to the hotel. It was 7:22. In all he covered some twenty-one blocks in twenty-four minutes. The New York Times calculated that he covered a north–south block in eighty-seven steps. He dismissed the press corps. “Roll call at the same time tomorrow,” he said. “I expect all you men to muster here.”
Harry shakes hands with New York cabbie Harry Lefkowitz while another cabbie, Marcus Straisant, looks on, June 28, 1953.
At one o’clock that afternoon, Margaret picked up her parents at the Waldorf in her new four-door Lincoln sedan. With Margaret behind the wheel, Harry in the passenger’s seat, and Bess in back, they drove to the River Club at 447 East 52nd Street, where they had lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Longwell. Mr. Longwell was the executive editor of Life magazine, which held the serial rights to Truman’s memoirs. After the meal, though, Truman insisted, not very believably, that he and Longwell had not discussed the memoirs. “We talked about ex-presidents, ex-secretaries of state, and sealing wax and shoes,” he said with a laugh.
Margaret dropped off her parents back at the Waldorf at 3:45. Bess stuck her head back into the car to say good-bye to her daughter. “Come on, Ma.” Harry chided Bess. “You’re blocking traffic.”
Harry and Bess stayed in that night. Maybe they ordered room service for dinner. In any event, they celebrated their wedding anniversary quietly.
Exactly thirty-four years before, on June 28, 1919, Harry S. Truman and Elizabeth Virginia Wallace had been married at Trinity Episcopal Church in Independence. They’d met as children in Sunday school but didn’t marry until he was thirty-five and she was thirty-four. Their courtship was complicated by the fact that Bess’s mother, Madge Wallace, didn’t think Harry was good enough for her daughter—an opinion she retained, to some degree, even after Harry became president.
Harry had just returned from military service in France the month before the wedding. One of his army buddies wrote Harry, “I hope you have the same success in this new war as you had in the old.” But their marriage was no war. As Harry and Bess grew older their love seems only to have deepened. “You are still on that pedestal where I placed you that day in Sunday school in 1890,” he wrote her on their twenty-ninth anniversary in 1948. “What an old fool I am.”
It’s unlikely a more loving couple than Harry and Bess Truman ever occupied the White House.
When a Washington newspaper described Bess as “dumpy,” Harry countered that she looked exactly how a woman her age ought to look. While they were in New York, Harry’s friend Leonard Lyons, a New York Post columnist, offered to arrange a private screening of the new Marilyn Monroe movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Harry declined. “Real gentlemen,” he told Lyons, “prefer gray hair.”
Theirs was an “ideal marriage,” according to Stanley Fike, a family friend. “Never been any question in my mind or in the mind of anyone I have ever known, but that there was only one woman in Harry Truman’s life and that was Bess Truman, Bess Wallace Truman.”
Since Bess never cared for the spotlight, it’s not surprising she and Harry celebrated their anniversary in privacy.
Besides, when you’re in a suite at the Waldorf Towers, why bother going out?
I had neither the connections nor the cash to spend a week at the Waldorf, where a cheap room nowadays runs about five hundred dollars a night. So I e-mailed the public relations firm that handles media requests for the hotel. I told them about the book and asked if it would be possible for me to get a reduced rate. The response, in so many words: “Nice try.”
Nonetheless, in the interest of research, I was determined to stay at the Waldorf, and with minimal