THE PRESIDENCY: Plain Man at Gettysburg

Like many a man with lesser burdens, Harry Truman needed to get away from it all. Physically, he was taking the strain well—his personal physician, Lieut. Colonel Wallace H. Graham, said: “At 62, the President has the body of a man of 40 and the reactions of a man 20 years younger.” In 14 months, he had gained ten pounds, a deep tan and the resiliency of second youth. But mentally he needed a rest, and he wanted it without “traveling like a circus.”

As civil servants streamed out of Government offices shutting down for the four-day Fourth of July weekend authorized by Congress, Mr. & Mrs. Truman left the White House in a car for President Roosevelt’s Shangri-La, a lodge in the Catoctin Mountains, 60 miles from Washington. With them was unobtrusive Lieut. Commander William Rigdon, up from the ranks, now assistant to the naval aide. There were no other attendants. There was no motorcade and no newsmen. At the lodge the Trumans had fried chicken for supper, took in a movie, were abed by 10:30.

Days of Rest. The Fourth was a day of real rest; the President walked in the woods, swam, lazed around the camp, saw another movie.

Saturday, Harry Truman turned tourist. As a onetime reserve officer who worked his correspondence courses on a Gettysburg map, he had long fancied himself an authority on the battle. He let newsmen in on his battle critique.

With Mrs. Truman at his side, the President drove a Secret Service convertible coupe along the park’s winding roads. Wearing a Panama hat and carrying binoculars, he studied the terrain from Big Round Top and a knoll overlooking the field across which Pickett’s Virginians had made their charge. Said Artilleryman Truman: Pickett’s men might have broken through with one more push. Then the son of Missouri Confederates added: We may all thank God that they didn’t. That would have been the end of the Union.

No matter how he tried, the President could not escape from the present. He kept thinking of the broken-gaited Paris conference (see INTERNATIONAL), and fumbled for analogies between the world’s ills today and those of the Union 81 years ago. Thoughtfully he read the inscription on the peace monument: “Peace eternal in a nation united.” Solemnly he said: “That is what we want. But let’s change that word [nation] to ‘world.’ Then you’d really have something.”

At the wheel of his car, rubbernecking, refighting the Civil War, Harry Truman had his wish of becoming a plain man again. Like other plain men, he was barred from a lookout tower on the field of Gettysburg by ropes and a sign: “Wet Paint.”