THE PRESIDENCY: Old Home Week

Harry Truman’s holiday week back home in Missouri had obviously been “a very nice time,” as he said afterwards, but he had made it plain that he had brought his work along. He begged off meeting with old cronies, vetoed onetime Partner Eddie Jacobson’s scheme to make him an honorary fire chief and give him a red helmet, and skipped a party given in his honor by Kansas City’s Truman Democratic Club, thereby generating a certain atmosphere of pique—the boys weren’t really angry, but they were disappointed. Most of his days were spent in his penthouse suite at the Muehlebach Hotel; his nights at the family home in nearby Independence.

He made one formal public appearance in Independence to dedicate a five-foot, bronze equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson which he had presented to Jackson County. The statue—a model of a larger one which Truman had commissioned for the Kansas City courthouse when he was a county judge—had been given to him by Sculptor Charles Keck in 1934. Harry Truman had been unable to use it or give it away, and it had languished in Keek’s studio for 15 years. But as a gift from a President it had become eminently acceptable and last week a crowd of 1,500 gathered to crane at its donor.

Harry Truman looked healthy and happy (some of his neighbors thought he was getting “chubby”) as he stood in the cold before the brick courthouse and told of his own troubles with the statue (“It is not small enough to keep in the house and too big to put in anybody’s front yard”). Then, amid applause, he called on his daughter to unveil the statue.

On the day before he left for Washington, the President did his best to catch up on his visiting. He chatted with Missouri’s Governor Forrest Smith and entertained a group of other political friends with a chile-con-carne feast in the hotel penthouse. That evening he got into a tuxedo and escorted Mrs. Truman and Margaret to dinner and an evening reception. The host: suave, bald Blevins Davis, 46, onetime Independence schoolteacher who became a theatrical producer, married aged Heiress Margaret Sawyer Hill (a daughter-in-law of Rail Tycoon James J. Hill) in 1946 and inherited her fortune when she died last year.

The next day the President flew back to Washington, stayed late in his office preparing for this week’s crucial set of congressional messages. Whatever the State of the Union, the State of Missouri had been real fine.