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Harry and Bess took 40 all the way back to Independence.

They drove straight into the setting sun.

Epilogue

The Trumans reached 219 Delaware Street at 9:00 P.M. on Wednesday, July 8. They’d been gone nineteen days. They’d driven some twenty-five hundred miles. Bess’s brothers George and Frank, who lived around the corner, helped them unpack. “It was a wonderful trip,” Bess told the Independence Examiner. Harry skipped his walk the next morning and slept in. He didn’t leave for work until around ten. On the way in, he dropped off his suits at the cleaners. In one of his jacket pockets he discovered the key to his room at the Waldorf. He mailed it back.

Harry and Bess would never take another long car trip. Harry was forced to admit that it was virtually impossible for them to travel incognito anymore. He lamented the loss of anonymity in a letter to his old friend Vic Householder, who had invited Harry to visit him in Arizona. “I’d give most anything to pay a visit to Arizona,” Harry wrote. “But Vic I’m a nuisance to my friends. I can’t seem to get from under that awful glare that shines on the White House…. So, Vic, we’ve decided that until the glamour wears off we’ll only do the official things we have to.”

But as Harry discovered, the glamour of the presidency never wears off. He and Bess did continue to travel, but the trips were choreographed. In 1956 they went to Europe, accompanied by Stanley Woodward, Harry’s former chief of protocol, and Woodward’s wife, Sara. Harry had been to Europe twice before, as an officer in World War I and to confer with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam, but it was Bess’s first trip overseas. They toured Paris, Rome, and London, meeting with dignitaries including Churchill and Pope Pius XII. On June 20, 1956—exactly three years after he and Bess had driven from Decatur to Wheeling, stopping at the McKinneys’ house for lunch—“Harricum” Truman was awarded an honorary degree at Oxford. “Never, never in my life,” he said, “did I ever think I’d be a Yank at Oxford.” “Give ‘em hell, Harricum!” the students shouted.

Harry, of course, never ran for office again, but he remained active and vocal—some would say too vocal—in the Democratic Party for the rest of his life. He never really stopped being a politician (an honorable profession in his estimation), but he grew less politic. He caused a minor flap in the 1960 presidential campaign when he said anybody who voted for his bitter enemy Richard Nixon “ought to go to hell.” John Kennedy was asked about the comment in one of his famous televised debates with Nixon. “Well,” he said, “I must say that Mr. Truman has his methods of expressing things…. I really don’t think there’s anything I can say to President Truman that’s going to cause him at the age of seventy-six to change his particular speaking manner. Maybe Mrs. Truman can, but I don’t think I can.” (Nixon, whom the Watergate tapes would reveal to be spectacularly profane, responded with his usual sanctimony: “I can only say that I am very proud that President Eisenhower restored dignity and decency and, frankly, good language to the conduct of the presidency of the United States.”)

The first volume of Truman’s memoirs, Year of Decisions, was published in 1955. The second, Years of Trial and Hope, came out the following year. Sales were strong, but the reviews were tepid. His army of ghostwriters—more than a dozen, by some estimates—had watered down the prose, rendering it a bland imitation of the pugnacious and opinionated president that America had come to know. Harry knew it, too. Across one page of an early draft he scribbled, “Good God, what crap!” (A third book, Mr. Citizen, which chronicled his life after the White House, better represented the man.)

In 1955 Harry traded in his 1953 Chrysler New Yorker—for the 1955 model. (If you happen to see the ‘53, please let me know.) It was in the new Chrysler that Harry chauffeured Margaret to Trinity Episcopal Church in Independence