Two days later, in Carey, Idaho, Truman dedicated a new airport in honor of a fallen World War II soldier—or so he thought. “I am honored,” he told a sprawling crowd of locals, “to dedicate this airport and present this wreath to the parents of the brave boy who died fighting for his country.” Truman heard a loud gasp. A woman spoke up: “Mr. President, it wasn’t my son, it was my daughter.”
Truman composed himself, then said, “Well, I am even more honored to dedicate this airport to a young woman who bravely gave her life for our country.”
It turned out, this young girl was no soldier; she had been joyriding in an airplane with her boyfriend and had crashed into a mountainside. “It wasn’t anything to laugh at,” recalled Truman aide Robert Dennison, who was present. “But it was awfully funny just the same.”
At one point, Truman endorsed a Republican congressional candidate by mistake. On another occasion, during one of his extemporaneous speeches, he began talking about his meetings with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945. “I like old Joe,” Truman said. Remembered Clark Clifford: “The uproar caused by the remark was immediate, sustained, and understandable.” From most Americans’ point of view, Stalin was the major source of global war anxiety. This was a man who, during the 1930s political “purges” in the Soviet Union, had overseen the disappearance and murder of millions of his own countrymen.
After Truman’s gaffe, Clifford approached the president with the press secretary Charlie Ross. “Mr. President,” Ross said, “we just have to tell you, frankly, that your ‘I like Old Joe’ remark is not going over well. We are going to get hammered for it, we know you understand, and we know you will not want to repeat that phrase.”
Truman paused reflectively. “Well, I guess I goofed,” he said.
More trouble awaited in Berkeley. When Truman arrived, he was given a fanfare welcome and a motorcade through crowded city streets. His car was followed by a pair of army Jeeps carrying newsreel cameramen. The University of California president was a die-hard Republican, and when he introduced Truman at the commencement event, he punctuated his address with jokes about the president’s incompetency. “I actually cringed,” recalled speechwriter Charlie Murphy.
At another stop, Truman gave a speech that was meant for a different town, confusing listeners. “At this point,” remembered speechwriter Murphy, “he decided that his staff work was not what it should be, and he called the staff in to meet with him around the table in the dining room on the train. He called the meeting, I’m sure, for the purpose of dressing the staff down.” But when it came time, the president could see how hard everyone was working, and how exhausted they were. “He couldn’t quite manage to scold us.”
When the train reached Los Angeles, Truman came face-to-face in a hotel room with James Roosevelt II, the eldest son of FDR, who had been actively campaigning to have General Dwight Eisenhower take Truman’s place on the 1948 Democratic ticket. Eisenhower had recently retired from the army and had taken a position as president of Columbia University in New York; he had declined to run for president of the United States, but politicos like James Roosevelt were still hounding him to save the Democratic Party from Harry Truman.
Truman poked his finger into Roosevelt’s chest and said, “If your father knew what you were doing to me, he would turn over in his grave. But get this straight: Whether you like it or not, I’m going to be the next President of the United States. That will be all. Good day.”
All along this two-week, 9,505-mile, seventy-three-speech trip, the pressmen aboard the train took potshots. “Not even the most charitable interpretation could describe the President’s performance at Carey, Idaho, as other than monumental ineptitude,” the Washington Post said of Truman’s airport-dedication error. Columnist Henry McLemore, in the Washington Evening Star: “Governors are running like deer. State chairmen are deserting . . . Many are using starting blocks, so anxious are they to quit what they consider a lost cause.”
Meanwhile, back in Washington, the Eightieth Congress completed its session and broke for recess after overriding three Truman vetoes in a single week—not one but three humiliations for the president. Among these overrides was a tax cut—the Revenue Act of 1948—a bill Truman had called “the wrong tax cut at the wrong time.” Truman argued that the measure was going to fan the flames of inflation. The Republican-controlled Congress pushed the legislation through, expecting to reap the rewards for cutting taxes come Election Day. Republican senator Eugene Millikin later commented that the tax cut “was deliberately contrived to attract votes.”
The more astute staffers and reporters aboard Truman’s train noticed that something was happening on this trip, apart from verbal missteps and congressional vetoes. “It wasn’t until Butte, Montana, that he began to hit his stride,” recalled White House correspondent Robert Nixon, who was traveling with the president. Truman began to draw larger crowds, and with his folksy style he connected with his audiences. “Truman began to just talk,” recalled Nixon. “He began to talk, instead of orating. He used his Missouri dialect. He became natural in every way. His talks began to be highly effective and to go over.”
Charlie Murphy recalled, “A typical reaction that you would hear from among people in the crowd was, ‘Why, he’s a nice man, I like him. He’s not at all like what they say about him in the papers.’ And you would hear this, time after time.”
As for a campaign strategy, the Truman administration took an unexpected approach. Truman’s speeches took aim at the Republican-controlled Eightieth Congress. In
