Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [88]
“I’ll tell you something,” the other Harry replied. “My mother didn’t care what I became.”
At Bess’s circle, one of the guests asked her for the secret to a happy marriage. “Well,” she answered, “I just let him alone.” She said she and Harry were enjoying their cross-country trip immensely, but they were looking forward to going home. “There are just two of us and we sort of rattle around the old house.” When she noticed the ice in her ginger ale had melted, Bess announced, “We need more ice,” and led the pack of women to the bar. When one couple came to say good-bye to her, the wife said, “When we come through Missouri we’re going to drive by your house.”
“Don’t drive by,” said Bess. “Come in.”
After the hour-long reception, the Trumans, the McKinneys, and two other couples went inside for dinner. Claire McKinney, meanwhile, went out dancing with friends. Later that night, she bumped into Alex Clark, the Indianapolis mayor, at a nightclub. “You need to meet my little brother,” the mayor told her. His name was Jim. He had just returned from Korea. Claire said it would be fine if Jim gave her a call sometime.
When Claire returned home around midnight, the former president of the United States was playing the piano, quite loudly, in her living room, much to the amusement of the rest of the dinner party. “They were all singing and laughing and having the best time,” says Claire. “It was—there couldn’t be anything more normal.” Claire went upstairs and tried to get some sleep while Harry Truman banged away on the piano downstairs.
The Trumans slept in Frank and Margaret McKinneys’ bedroom that night. Frank slept on a couch in his study. Margaret slept in Claire’s room. The McKinneys’ bedroom was en suite, so the rest of the household was spared the sight of a slightly tipsy Harry Truman padding around the second floor in his pajamas in the middle of the night, searching for the bathroom.
At 7:20 the next morning, Harry emerged from the McKinney home for his morning constitutional. Accompanied by Frank McKinney and the Indianapolis News’s political reporter, Ed Ziegner, Harry covered about twelve blocks in the neighborhood around the McKinney home. He slowed his usual 120-step-a-minute pace, he said, “to be considerate of the others.” Along the way Truman and his companions discussed the Civil War, World War I, the trials and tribulations of other ex-presidents, and his former associates in Washington. Returning to the McKinney home after thirty minutes, Harry turned to his host and said, “Frank, this will cost you a big breakfast.” But McKinney was in no shape to cook. He was winded. “It was the first walk I’ve taken in I don’t know how long,” he said. “I didn’t even know what streets had sidewalks.”
After breakfast Truman held a press conference in the McKinneys’ living room. He said the Democrats lost in 1952 because the “people were prosperous, fat, and easygoing.” “They thought maybe they would like a change,” he said. “They let glamour and demagoguery get the best of them.”
Asked if he was “optimistic about the future of this country,” he said, “I’m always optimistic about this great country of ours. I’ve always said I wish I could see the next 50 years—it will be the greatest period in the history of the world.” Asked if he didn’t “expect to see most of it,” Truman laughed. “Well, I’m in pretty good health now. But according to the Bible after next year I’ll be living on borrowed time.”
At one point the press conference was interrupted when the McKinneys’ two-and-a-half-year-old daughter,