THE PRESIDENCY: Independent Man

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THE PRESIDENCY

Like many another U.S. citizen, Harry Truman had been planning vacations since the snow melted last spring. He had hoped to go to the Philippines, had planned a trip to Alaska. But he had stayed in the capital instead, watching crisis after crisis surge and ebb away.

Last week his hopes for a summer recess from conferences, official calls, paper work and Washington's weather finally materialized. Wearing his weariness with a jaunty and well-pressed air, he boarded the 244-ft. presidential yacht Williamsburg, set out on a dawdling, 18-day cruise into New England waters.

He was accompanied by four close cronies—plump, beaming RFC Director George Allen, Secretary of the Treasury John Snyder, Presidential Adviser Clark Clifford, and Theodore Marks of Kansas City, who had been best man at his wedding 27 years ago. He had only an irreducible minimum of White House aides. Twenty-three reporters and cameramen were isolated well astern in an escort vessel, the destroyer escort Weiss. As the yacht headed downriver under a grey, drizzling sky, Harry Truman stretched, left his guests and strolled off to his stateroom for a nap.

Luxury. Next morning as the Williamsburg moved up Chesapeake Bay in cheering sunshine, he slept until seven o'clock—shamelessly abandoning his habit of rising at 5:30. The morning after that, with the yacht moving north in the open Atlantic, he slept until nine.

Between times he took sun baths in a pair of bright green trunks, began reading Arthur Schlesinger's The Age of Jackson. When the yacht anchored in Delaware Bay he went swimming, employing a sedate sidestroke which enabled him to keep his glasses unsplashed.

At week's end, when the Williamsburg moved into Narragansett Bay, he was sporting a two-day beard. He had a second sensation in reserve. When the yacht tied up at the Quonset (R.I.) Naval Air Base, he broke out a cap which made shoreside loiterers blink—a white creation with a wide bill and a billowy crown which flopped like a tam-o'-shanter. Thus arrayed he was driven to the Plum Beach home of his new naval aide, Captain James H. Foskett, where he contentedly attacked a heaping dinner of ham and chicken pot pie.

Next day he received a selected knot of Rhode Island politicians aboard the yacht, went ashore to visit the Naval War College at Newport. Then, after waiting out a Northeaster, the Williamsburg headed seaward again.