Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [90]
Murray is a partner in an Indianapolis law firm, where he specializes in real estate law. He served eleven years in the Indiana Senate and ran for lieutenant governor in 2000 (he lost). In 2004 he was the chairman of Mitch Daniels’s gubernatorial campaign (Daniels won). Since then he’s been chairman of the state Republican Party.
I asked Murray how it came to be that he, the grandson of the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, came to be the head of the GOP in Indiana. He told me he’d been interested in politics since he was a child. It was practically the family business, after all. At nine years old he worked on his Uncle Alex’s second mayoral campaign, and at sixteen he worked on Richard Lugar’s first senatorial campaign (losing efforts, both). He was close to his grandfather, he said, but he never even considered being a Democrat. “I strongly believe, however, he would truly be proud that I am state chair,” Murray said. “Even if it is the GOP.”
Murray had recently chaired the state convention (it was held the same weekend as the Clapton concert). At the convention, delegates to the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul were chosen. Murray had had to cope with an insurgent faction of Republicans loyal to the irrepressible presidential candidate Ron Paul. The “Paulites” had tried to elect “stealth delegates” who would vote for Paul instead of John McCain at the national convention. “They’re true believers,” Murray sighed. He sounded more than a little exasperated with that faction of the party. It reminded me of how his grandfather had had to keep the fractured Democrats together at the 1952 national convention. It seems that being a party leader, Republican or Democratic, is less about politics than peacekeeping—or herding cats.
It was time for dinner. Claire asked if we would like red wine or white. The consensus was that both bottles should be opened. We enjoyed a lovely meal of chicken cordon bleu and roasted vegetables, with Apple Brown Betty and vanilla gelato for dessert. Throughout dinner I told Truman stories at an ever-increasing volume while my companions pretended not to be bored. We also talked about how politics has changed since 1953, how it seems to have become more personal and less personable.
“Politics was different then,” Claire said. “It wasn’t as mean. Politics today is mean. People respected each other. I remember one night my father came home for dinner and he said, ‘A terrible thing happened in our town today. A man who was running for president of the United States came to our town to talk today—and people threw eggs at him.’ It was Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate. My father said, ‘Respect is owed to anybody who is running for this office.’ It was respect. It wasn’t personal.”
It was a wonderful evening. I had been treated like a king—or, better yet, an ex-president. I slept like a baby in Claire’s guest room that night, which is probably how Harry slept the night he stayed with Claire’s parents all those years before.
Harry Truman and Frank McKinney remained close friends for the rest of their lives. And, like Harry, Frank remained active in Democratic Party politics. Over the years he was offered a number of prominent political positions, including a seat on the Securities and Exchange Commission, but he declined them all to stay in Indianapolis. In 1968, at Truman’s urging, President Johnson appointed McKinney ambassador to Spain. It was a challenging assignment. At the time the United States was negotiating with the Franco regime to keep its military bases in Spain. The Senate confirmed McKinney’s appointment, but he was too ill to take the post. He died of cancer in 1974. He was sixty-nine.
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