The 1956 Truman European Tour was a seven-week journey through Europe by Harry S. Truman and Bess Wallace Truman, and one of the happiest trips of their lives. Beginning on Truman’s seventy-second birthday and culminating in an honorary degree at the University of Oxford, the tour joined a long-awaited private adventure to an expansive public welcome. Truman arrived as a former President and left an impression not merely as a political figure, but as an approachable representative of the United States.

A long-awaited journey

Less than a month after Margaret Truman’s wedding, Harry and Bess set out across Europe in what was described as their own honeymoon. They had long dreamed of traveling abroad. For Bess, it was her first venture overseas; for Harry, it was his third trip to Europe but his first as a private citizen. He was carrying his first passport. Their journey also placed Truman in a tradition of former presidents traveling abroad: Ulysses S. Grant had toured Europe as part of a famous trip around the world, and Theodore Roosevelt had delivered lectures there, including at Oxford, after his African safari.

They left the Independence depot at 7:15 on the morning of May 8, 1956. The date was Truman’s birthday, and friends and family gathered to see them off. A birthday cake was cut and passed around in what he called “a grand party.” The send-off had its mishap: while bringing suitcases down from the attic that morning, Truman slipped on the stairs and twisted his ankle. It swelled, he said, to the size of two. He nevertheless took a shiny black cane and continued with the trip, walking only a little more slowly than usual during the first few days.

The Trumans sailed from New York aboard the United States, accompanied by Stanley Woodward, Truman’s former chief of protocol, and Woodward’s wife, Sara. They landed at Le Havre and traveled by train to Paris. Rain followed them for much of the tour, but Truman noted in his diary, “rain, rain, rain, day after day, with sometimes a peep of sun.” The weather did little to diminish his spirits.

Cities, crowds, and a public welcome

On May 17, Truman spent his first full day in Paris at a small outdoor table at the Café de la Paix, near the Opéra, drinking coffee. At first, people did not immediately turn to look; then heads began to turn and passers-by stopped. Truman explained that he had been there before, during World War I. A news-service photograph later showed him walking along the Place de l’Opéra, swinging his cane.

The press followed him closely. Several hundred reporters had waited at the Gare Saint-Lazare for his arrival, and afterward there were seldom fewer than a dozen around him. The crowds were not confined to France. At the railway station in Rome, hundreds welcomed the party with cries of “Viva Truman!” and “Hi, Harry!” Truman and his party stayed at the Hassler Hotel near the Spanish Steps. Henry R. Luce guided Truman through Rome’s ancient monuments, filling in for his wife, Clare Booth Luce, the American ambassador to Italy, who had fallen ill. The former President and the publisher sat together in the Colosseum, speculating about the vanished Roman Empire. Later, on Rome’s Capitol Hill, Truman introduced himself and shook hands in front of the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius as American tourists cheered and followed.

Truman was determined to see as much as possible, and the itinerary tested Bess, who tried to keep pace while seldom smiling for photographers. Their route through France notably did not return to the Vosges Mountains, the Argonne, or Verdun; Truman apparently had no wish to see those places again. The contrast between such wartime landscapes and the festive reception elsewhere remained part of the journey’s shape, even as the tour moved on through European cities.

In Brussels, The Hague, and Amsterdam, crowds cheered them at railway stations. At the Dutch State Museum, Harry and Bess saw what the account describes as the largest exhibition of Rembrandts ever held, and they had lunch with Queen Juliana at the Royal Soestdikk Palace. On June 17, they continued to England, the part of the journey Truman had most anticipated. He recorded, “We crossed the Channel on the night boat,” and arrived “in beautiful sunshine….”

Oxford and the tour’s high point

The stated reason for the journey was a longstanding invitation for Truman to accept an honorary degree at Oxford. The ceremony on June 20 became its emotional and symbolic center. Wearing the traditional crimson robe and crushed black velour hat, Truman walked at the head of the procession beside the Public Orator at one of the world’s oldest and most distinguished universities. He had never attended college or pretended to scholarly erudition; the honor brought him to a setting he had not expected to inhabit. Before the ceremony, he told a reporter, “Never, never in my life, did I ever think I’d be a Yank at Oxford.”

The occasion mattered to Truman personally, but it was also part of the larger public story of the tour. He had worried that he might disappoint at Oxford. Afterward, he told Dean Acheson, who had also received an honorary degree there, “I was so afraid I’d let you down at Oxford, but apparently I didn’t.” The ceremony offered a striking measure of how far his path had carried him: from a man without a college education to the head of an academic procession at Oxford.

The goodwill ambassador and return home

The journey ended with a final public welcome in Britain. On June 26, Harry and Bess joined the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh for lunch at Buckingham Palace. Two days later, they sailed home from Southampton. During Truman’s visit to Chartwell, Lord Beaverbrook had called him the greatest ambassador of goodwill America had ever had; similar judgments followed him throughout the trip.

The praise came from observers who emphasized both his popularity and his manner. An American reporter overheard an English spectator say, “Too bad he’s not campaigning for anything in this country,” adding, “He’d win any election.” The London Evening Standard called the visit the “Truman Triumph,” while the Daily Telegraph described him as the “living and kicking symbol of everything that everyone likes best about the United States.” A United Press account stressed that an “ordinary” American had received both a red-carpet welcome from officials and warmth from the public. The reception made Truman’s unpretentious manner a diplomatic asset: he charmed Europe, in the book’s account, by being himself.

The welcome did not keep Truman away from domestic politics for long. Scarcely unpacked, he plunged into the election-year contest over the Democratic nomination, unsuccessfully trying to secure it for Averell Harriman rather than Adlai Stevenson. At the convention in Chicago, he argued that the country needed a President who wanted the job and criticized Stevenson’s fighting spirit. The contrast was sharp: on the European tour, Truman’s standing seemed to travel ahead of him, while at home his political influence had limits. The journey nonetheless left a vivid record of a former President welcomed across Europe as a person as well as a public symbol.