The Press: Sentimental Journey

Shortly after noon, the Sacred Cow lifted its tail, charged down the slushy runway, and lumbered off into the chill mist that veiled Washington’s National Airport. All commercial flights that day had been canceled. Harry Truman, as he climbed aboard, turned to the 18 shivering newsmen and grinned: “I’m sorry to bring you boys out in this bad weather.”

After he left, the companion C-54 that newsmen were to ride had to be trundled into the hangar and thawed out. On the bumpy, six-and-a-half-hour flight to Kansas City, they played listless poker, worried about the weather.

They landed long after the President had hurried off to see his mother at Grandview. It was midnight before they caught up with him. It had been a wearing, tedious, all-but-newsless day.

Most of the 13 White House reporters and five photographers who tagged along on the President’s Christmas homecoming thought it was a foolish trip. In their stories, some of them said so. Wrote the New York Times’s Felix Belair: it was “one of the most hazardous ‘sentimental journeys’ ever undertaken by an American Chief of State.” All last week, editorials viewed the expedition with alarm: it was nice that Harry Truman wanted to go home for Christmas, but it would be an awfully easy way to lose a President of the U.S.

Newsmen had felt compelled to go along: some of the biggest stories of the year had come out of Harry Truman’s 25,000 miles of travel. Lately, like Franklin Roosevelt, he had taken to making his news in casual ways, at unexpected places. And if he made news by risking his neck, that news had to be covered, too.