Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip by Matthew Algeo Page A

good humor,”
Time
magazine reported, “Harry Truman met the press, felt the cloth of a reporter’s cord suit and allowed as how he had one just like it.” He didn’t want to say anything about Eisenhower—he was saving that for his speech in Philadelphia. He also didn’t want to comment on the ongoing Korean cease-fire negotiations. But he answered a host of other questions with his usual mix of candor and humor.
    Was he optimistic or pessimistic about world affairs in general? a reporter asked.
    “I always have been optimistic that the peace of the world can be reached and maintained,” answered Truman.
    “In our time?”
    “I am not a prophet.”
    Asked about rumors that his friend McKinney might be returned to his post as Democratic Party chairman, Truman enthusiastically endorsed the idea. “Frank’s the best chairman the party ever had,” he said, a not-so-subtle swipe at the incumbent, Stephen Mitchell (not to mention Adlai Stevenson). “Of course,” he added, seeming to catch himself, “the present chairman was duly elected and all that.”
    Would he support Stevenson if he ran again in 1956? Truman said he was for “no candidate” at the moment, but “when the time comes, I’ll make my sentiments known.” But he promised to campaign for any candidate the Democrats nominated. “The Democratic Party has been very good to me,” he said. “It has done all for me it could do for any one man. I am very grateful.”
    Would he consider running for office himself again? Truman’s ambiguous answer seemed to leave the door open. He said he was busy with other things at the moment, but he was still interested in politics, of course. What about Margaret? Will she run for office? “She’s over twenty-one,” he said, smiling, “and can do what she wants to.” (Privately, he joked that Margaret couldn’t run for Congress because “she’d never be able to get up early enough in the morning.”)
    Truman just seemed to be getting warmed up when McKinney cut him off. “If you’re going to get across Ohio today,” McKinney said, “you’d better be on the way.” Truman concurred, ending the press conference.
    Bess also granted an interview on the porch that day. That was exceptionally rare, because she guarded her privacy fiercely. When she became first lady, she steadfastly refused to grant interviews or hold press conferences. When in the fall of 1947 she finally consented to answer questions from reporters, the questions had to be submitted in writing—and her answers were hardly revealing:
    Did she think there would ever be a woman President of the United States?
    No.
    Would she want to be President?
    No.
    Would she want Margaret ever to be First Lady?
    No.
    If she had a son, would she try to bring him up to be President?
    No.
    Did any of the demands of her role as First Lady ever give her stage fright?
    No comment.
    What would you like to do and have your husband do when he is no longer president?
    Return to Independence.
     
    Since she declined to engage the press, the public never really got to know Bess Truman. Her image was that of a dowdy, slightly dour housewife. Nothing could have been further from the truth. “She was full of charm,” remembered journalist Charles Robbins, “with a repressed girlish mischievousness and a dry wit that quickly let the air out of pretense and righted departures from common sense.”
    That she submitted to questions on the McKinneys’ porch in Indianapolis was, as Thelma Machael put it in the
Indianapolis News,
indicative of “the deep enjoyment of her present semiprivate life.”
    “Her gestures are restrained,” Machael wrote of Bess on the porch that afternoon, “her laughter soft and sincere and her carriage erect.”
    The ex-president, Bess reported, was easy to cook for—except for just one thing: “I don’t dare serve onions in any form.” His favorite meal? Steak with buttered baked potatoes. “Goodness, that man can’t put enough