Harry Truman Loved Automobiles and Driving
Harry Truman’s first automobile was a 1911 Stafford. Before Truman entered the army in 1917 that company was already defunct. His century was the century of the automobile and cross-country car trips, and Truman participated in them wholeheartedly. Truman simply loved to drive.
When he left the presidency in 1953 he almost immediately purchased a 1953 Chrysler Windsor. That car was soon replaced by a 1955 New Yorker, which he would shortly drive across the country to New York. At the time of his death in 1972, Truman owned a 1972 Chrysler Newport, purchased only a few months earlier. His widow Bess used the car for another ten years.
Truman’s lifelong love of driving fostered a thorough knowledge of roads and the necessity of building better ones to connect the nation. Most of his driving predated Interstate highways, fast food stops, and roadside hotels. When Truman planned his road trips he did so using free gas station supplied maps, estimates of daily mileage based on road conditions, and town directories to locate lodgings. As president, he chafed at being driven, with at least one notable exception.
In July 1947 President Truman left an engagement in Charlottesville Virginia to motorcade back to Washington. Despite Secret Service protests, Truman insisted on taking the wheel of the Presidential limousine (it was a road he knew well from his days as a senator) and driving home. Reporters in the following car clocked the president at speeds exceeding 65 mph, well over the state speed limit of 50. When the Presidential transgression was reported in a Richmond newspaper. Truman wrote an angry and defensive letter in reply, pointing out the motorcade had a Virginia State Police escort and Truman could not have exceeded their speed. Any violation was therefore theirs, not his. He never sent the letter. It was found in his papers at the Truman Library.