A friend and reader tipped me to the book \u201cHarry Truman\u2019s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip,\u201d by Matthew Algeo (Chicago Review Press, 2009). I really appreciate that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I enjoyed this book more than any other I\u2019ve read in quite a while. I found it \u2026 charming, <\/em>a word which has a very small and rarely-used place in my own vocabulary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After graciously turning over the controls of government to his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Truman and his wife Bess left Secret Service behind and went on a road trip in his new 1953 Chrysler New Yorker, with Harry at the wheel virtually the entire time. Visiting friends in DC, doing the tourist thing in New York City where their only child Margaret lived, and eventually back to their home in Independence, Missouri, the Trumans were in touch with ordinary Americans the whole time. There are some who argue that they were the last \u201cordinary American\u201d first family to occupy the White House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Truman has always been a hero of mine. He was the man who had the courage to pull the trigger on the atomic bombs that ended World War II, probably preventing a seven-digit count of casualties on either side had the war continued. Describing himself as an ordinary citizen and ordinary tourist during the trip, he found out otherwise. People were shocked to see this luminary and his wife out and about, not surrounded by bodyguards. When some local police chiefs learned he was in town alone with his wife, they scrambled their cops to provide protection: no one was going to assassinate an American President, past or present, on their <\/em>watch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Author Matthew Algeo provides context. Not only the political background of Truman and his times, but little life details. How roadside motels rose in America, for example. The economy of the time. People were frustrated that gasoline had gone up to 27 cents a gallon, and Truman \u2013 who kept scrupulous track of his mileage \u2013 was delighted to learn that his big black Chrysler got 17 miles to the gallon on the roads of the time. (And, by the way, I didn\u2019t know that the movement toward paved roads in our country went all the way back to the popularity of bicycling in the 1880s.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Truman left the job with no pension at all, and turned down many sinecures and endorsement offers that came from the private sector. Algeo compares that adroitly and meaningfully with some of his successors, most notably the Clintons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n