Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip Read Online Free PDF

announced that Truman had agreed to sell his memoirs to Doubleday for an advance of six hundred thousand dollars. It was an astronomical sum, especially in 1953, when the average worker’s annual salary was barely more than four thousand. It was assumed the former president’s financial worries were over. Like Grant before him, he’d been saved from financial ruin by a book deal. But the truth was far different.
    For one thing, the advance would be taxed as income, at a rate of 67 percent. Four years earlier, when Truman was in the White House, the IRS had allowed Dwight Eisenhower to claim his $635,000 advance on
Crusade in Europe
as a capital gain, rather than income, reasoning that the general was not a writer by profession. That reduced the tax on Ike’s advance to 25 percent. When Truman asked the IRS for permission to claim his own advance as a capital gain, as Eisenhower had, his request was denied. This did little to improve relations between the ex-president and the incumbent.
    Out of what remained of his advance, Truman would have to pay a small army of researchers, stenographers, and ghostwriters, not to mention his other expenses. Years later, Truman would declare—with more than a touch of bitterness—that out of that six-hundred-thousand-dollar advance, he had realized just thirty-seven thousand dollars.
    Still, the book deal allowed him to splurge just a little bit. In March, he, Bess, and Margaret took a Hawaiian vacation, though Harry’s friends Averill Harriman and Ed Pauley picked up most of the tab. And, even before that, Harry went shopping for a car. He needed one. Since returning to Independence he’d either been using Margaret’s, which was stored in the garage, or borrowing his brother-in-law’s.
    Few presidents loved automobiles as much as Harry Truman did. His first car was a 1911 Stafford, which he purchased used in 1914 for $600 (or $650—accounts vary). Hand-built in Kansas City by a mechanic named Terry Stafford, it was a flashy car, black with brass accents, a thirty-horsepower engine, and a three-speed transmission. On a good road it was capable of speeds as fast as sixty miles per hour. This was no Model T. Legend has it that he bought the Stafford to impress Bess, whom he was courting at the time. It certainly made it easier for him to commute from his family’s farm in Grandview to Bess’s house in Independence. Previously, he had had to catch a train or a trolley. In the Stafford, Harry took Bess for afternoon drives, and Sunday picnics along the Little Blue River. When his National Guard unit was called up in 1917, he took the car with him to Camp Doniphan in Oklahoma, where he was stationed for training. Before he was shipped overseas, Harry reluctantly sold the Stafford to an army sergeant for two hundred dollars. “It was an excellent car,” he wrote, “and would take an awful beating. You can be sure of that if one lasted me as long as three years, which that one did.”

     
    Harry behind the wheel of his first car, a 1911 Stafford, at a picnic around 1915. “It was an excellent car,” he said. Seated next to him is Bess Wallace, the future Mrs. Truman. The other passengers are Bess’s relatives.
     
    For the rest of his life, Truman bought nothing but Chryslers, Dodges, and Plymouths. In November 1940, he bought two: a gray 1941 Chrysler Royal Club coupe for himself and a gray Chrysler Windsor sedan for Bess. They were the last cars he had owned. After he became president, he gave the coupe to his sister and sold the sedan to a friend in Washington.
    Shortly after he started shopping for a new car, Truman received a telephone call from K. T. Keller, the chairman of the Chrysler Corporation.
    “Lincolns seemed to have had the inside track at the White House while you were there,” Keller told Truman, referring to the presidential limousine fleet. “But we want you to use a Chrysler.”
    “What kind of a model do you suggest?” Truman asked.
    “Our best model