On August 20, US officials in Berlin announced that the Soviets had raided the American sector of the city and had kidnapped seven German policemen at gunpoint. Three had apparently escaped but four were still missing and were feared dead. The next day, another report came out of Berlin that the Soviets had once again raided the US sector and had beaten and stabbed German police officers.
Days later, the Communist party in power in the Soviet sector of Berlin stormed city hall, demanding a liquidation of the Berlin city council. That night thirty thousand Berliners in the western sectors gathered in the hot night to protest. The city’s elected mayor, Professor Ernst Reuter—whose administration the Soviets refused to recognize—demanded justice.
“We have said ‘no’ and we shall say ‘no’ again until liberty and democracy have been regained for Berlin,” he announced. “We Berliners have said no to communism and we will fight it with all our might as long as there is a breath in us . . . The struggle for Berlin is a struggle for the freedom of the world.”
In Washington, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal felt the pressure from across the ocean. They were attempting to clarify guidelines for the use of the atomic bomb. They created one document for “immediate use,” while another was to take precedence “in the event of war.” Forrestal’s continued effort to have custody of the atomic stockpile placed in the military’s hands was getting nowhere with Truman. No matter how much work the Defense Department put into creating guidelines for the bomb, any decision to use it remained with the president.
Back in the White House at the end of August, Truman prepared to begin his campaign trip while the Democratic National Committee made a frantic push to raise money. They needed $10,000 for Truman’s nationwide Labor Day radio broadcast from Detroit, $10,000 for Truman-Barkley campaign posters, $17,000 for two Barkley broadcasts, etc.
Truman packed his bags for what would turn out to be one of the most unusual trips any president had ever made. Around this time, he received a visit from an old friend, Leslie Biffle, the secretary of the Senate. Biffle was from a small town in Arkansas. For a summer vacation, he had traveled undercover as a chicken farmer, driving through farming towns in the Midwest to gauge the grassroots sentiments of America, regarding the upcoming election. He told Truman that his impressions of voters defied everything he was reading about in the newspapers. Truman, Biffle said, could win.
“Do you think so?” Truman asked. “Do you really think so?”
Just after lunch on September 5, 1948, Truman and his daughter, Margaret, climbed aboard the Ferdinand Magellan, the rear car on a seventeen-car train parked at Union Station. Truman sported a gray fedora atop a blue suit, while Margaret wore a blue silk dress, a cocoa-brown hat, and a thick layer of red lipstick. At 2:30 p.m., with a jarring lurch, the train’s steel wheels began to turn. Bess was on vacation visiting family in Denver. She would join the campaign soon. This would be the Truman family home for the foreseeable future—an adventure covering nearly thirty-five thousand miles.
The latest numbers by pollster Elmo Roper made Dewey’s lead seem insurmountable. Roper had the GOP candidate running 46.3 percent to Truman’s 31.5 percent, with Wallace at just 3 percent and “other candidates” at 2.4 percent. “I’d be much better off personally if we lose the election,” Truman wrote his sister just before taking off, “but I fear that the country would go to hell and I have to try to prevent that.” The reporters aboard had given the train carrying the president a nickname: the Truman Special.
The Ferdinand Magellan was the only train car ever built especially for presidential travel. Entering through the Magellan’s front door (which had a vault-like lock on it for privacy), the first thing one saw was a galley and pantry where cooks worked, followed by servants’ quarters, then an oak-paneled dining space that featured a table covered in a white tablecloth and eight chairs upholstered with thin gold-and-green stripes. In the back of the train car, on one side, a lounge offered a row of comfortable chairs, behind which were two windows—three-inch-thick bulletproof glass. Atop those windows was the round presidential seal. Also mounted on a wall in this lounge was a speedometer, so the president could see how fast the train was moving.
A back door opened onto an outdoor speaker’s platform at the rear of the train. When the train pulled into a “whistle-stop,” staffers would set up a microphone with three loudspeakers, while Secret Service agents installed a rope to keep crowds at a safe distance from the president and his family.
Directly adjacent to the lounge were four staterooms marked A, B, C, and D. The two middle rooms made up the presidential suite, one for Harry and one for Bess. They were joined by a shared bath and shower room. Each stateroom had a bed, a dresser, and a telephone that could be hooked up when the train pulled into a station. The car was cooled using a blower system and some three tons of ice that needed to be continuously replaced.
In the dining and bar car, crowds lined up for a sendoff highball. Political reporters rubbed elbows with photographers and newsreel camera crews, Truman staff, Secret Service agents, Army Signal Corps engineers working in the communications room, and teams of railroad workers.
Another train traveled a few miles ahead of the Truman Special for safety reasons, as did an advance man, White House staffer Oscar Chapman, whose job it was to drum up interest in every town at which the president stopped, so that when Truman got onto the Ferdinand Magellan’s back platform to speak, everything
