Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [68]
Four and a half years later, when Tom Naud, one of the Today show’s announcers, spotted Harry Truman’s bespectacled visage in the window behind Dave Garroway, he grabbed a microphone and ran outside to grab an impromptu interview with the former president. Naud asked Truman how he stayed in shape and how fast he walked. Then Truman had a question for Naud. Pointing through the window into the studio, he asked, “What’s that fellow doing with the baby in there?” The baby in question was J. Fred Muggs.
His cameo complete, Truman smiled and waved and went his merry way.
I was determined to appear as one of the faces in the background of the Today show too, so early on the morning of Friday, May 2, 2008, I set out from my friends’ apartment in Brooklyn for the NBC studios at Rockefeller Center. How hard could it be? All I had to do was stand there.
I had forgotten, however, that Today hosts live concerts on Rockefeller Plaza most Fridays. By the time I reached the plaza, it was already teeming—with women of a certain age. They were there to see Neil Diamond.
The crowd was impenetrable. I couldn’t get anywhere near the stage, where all the cameras were.
Not only that, I hadn’t brought a sign. A sign, it turns out, is nearly a prerequisite for getting your mug on Today. The cameras favor people with signs, especially signs that mention the Today show. The handmade Today show sign is practically a modern form of folk art. A stocky guy next to me was holding a large piece of red cardboard with Magic Marker letters: WHERE IN THE WORLD IS MATT LAUER? (Lauer, one of the program’s hosts, periodically disappears to strange and exotic locales, leaving viewers to guess his whereabouts.) I asked him why he’d made it. “To get on TV,” he said with a shrug. Why else? Soon he waded fearlessly into the crushing mob, a strategy for which I had neither the inclination nor the physique.
So there I was, stuck in the back of the crowd and signless. Neil played “Song Sung Blue” and “America.” The crowd was only growing larger. When he launched into the obligatory song from the new CD, I finally gave up and headed back to Brooklyn, disappointed.
Back at my friends’ apartment, I decided to watch the show, which I had recorded. Mostly I was curious to see what Neil Diamond looked like from less than a block away. Imagine my surprise when I saw myself. Unbeknownst to me, a camera mounted on a robotic crane had panned over the crowd exactly one hour and thirty-one minutes into the program. In a sea of screaming Diamond-heads I could clearly be seen for about a second, standing ramrod straight and stone faced. I looked a bit like a stalker. Or an assassin. Nevertheless, I had, in fact, appeared on the Today show.
Later in the show I saw a close-up of a sign: WHERE IN THE WORLD IS MATT LAUER? The camera pulled back. The stocky guy who’d been standing next to me had had his wish fulfilled too.
After his morning walk on Friday, July 3, Harry visited the new United Nations headquarters on First Avenue. Truman played a crucial role in the creation of the UN. On the evening of April 12, 1945, just minutes after he had hastily taken the oath of office in the cabinet room of the White House, an aide asked Truman if the San Francisco conference on the United Nations was going to take place as scheduled in less than two weeks. “I said it most certainly was,” Truman remembered. “I said it was what Roosevelt had wanted, and it had to take place if we were going to keep the peace. And that’s the first decision I made as President of the United States.”
It was at the San Francisco conference that the United Nations charter was ratified. Afterward, a committee formed to find a home for the new organization. European delegates argued for Geneva, the home of the League of Nations, but the Soviets (of all people) pushed for the United States. “The Old World had it once,” said Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko, “and it is time