Eddie McKim

Eddie McKim was a former sergeant in Harry S. Truman’s Battery D and a friend Truman turned to at both a political turning point and the bewildering first hours of his presidency. Their connection was personal as well as practical: Truman brought McKim along during the 1944 campaign, planned to spend the night of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death playing poker in McKim’s room, and then, after becoming President, greeted him as his first visitor and asked him to remain. The welcome did not become a permanent place in the new administration; McKim was soon told that it would be best for him to return to Omaha.

From Battery D to the Campaign

McKim’s military connection to Truman remained part of the way their friendship was described. Later, when Matt Connelly recalled Truman’s remark about sending McKim home, he remembered the President invoking the authority he had once exercised in the battery: Truman had been McKim’s sergeant, had busted him, and could do so again. The recollection gives the relationship a familiar, teasing register, but it also points to an older hierarchy that Truman could call upon even after becoming head of state.

By the time Truman was making a national campaign trip, McKim was among the people assisting him. The party traveled in the Henry Stanley, an old combination sleeper and dining car, with Hugh Fulton, Matt Connelly, and Fred Canfil. McKim’s inclusion places him within the small traveling circle around Truman, though the account does not specify his particular duties. In a separate recollection, Connelly described how Truman recruited him as a political right-hand man after the convention: amid the press and photographers, Truman took him aside to the “doghouse,” mixed a drink, and invited him to travel on the coming campaign trip. McKim is not identified as part of that conversation, but the two details together show the campaign’s mixture of political work and close personal association: Truman relied on a compact group of companions, and McKim was among those who went with him.

The Night of the Succession

The night Roosevelt died, Truman remembered that McKim was in Washington and that the two had planned to play poker in McKim’s room at the Statler Hotel. The immediate demands of the presidency displaced that ordinary appointment. When Truman called McKim through the White House operator, he explained that the evening’s plan was off. The detail is striking not because it suggests that Truman mistook the gravity of the moment, but because it preserves the personal routine caught up in it: even as the country’s leadership changed, Truman’s first thought of McKim was as the friend with whom he had arranged to spend the night.

The next morning, McKim was the first visitor to come into Truman’s office. Truman rose from the desk to greet him and apologized for the previous night. McKim, nervous and trying to observe the formality of the setting, remained standing; Truman invited him to take a chair. When McKim said he would be returning home that afternoon, Truman asked him to stay, adding, “I need you.” The exchange moves quickly from apology to welcome. McKim’s unease before the President contrasts with Truman’s familiar gesture of making room for him, and the short request conveys how urgently Truman wanted trusted company amid the abrupt change in his circumstances.

A Welcome That Did Not Last

The invitation did not settle McKim’s future in Washington. He would soon be gone: Truman told him, with great regret, that it would be best for him to go home to Omaha. Connelly’s later recollection supplied the battery anecdote as Truman explained his authority to send McKim away, recalling that Truman had once disciplined him as a sergeant and could do so again. The memory joins affection to command without suggesting that McKim had committed any specific offense or that the departure followed a stated dispute. The account gives the decision and the joking explanation, but not a fuller reason for it.

McKim’s part in the story is therefore defined by a brief but revealing sequence rather than a long public career. He appears first among Truman’s campaign companions, then as the friend whose room held their abandoned poker plans on the night Roosevelt died, and finally as the first person Truman welcomed into his office as President. Truman’s request that he stay was immediate and personal; the subsequent decision that he return home made that closeness temporary. Together, the episodes show the new President reaching for the familiarity of an old military friendship while the demands of his new position were already reshaping who could remain beside him.