Truman’s 1956 trip to Europe

Truman’s 1956 trip to Europe gave Harry S. Truman and Bess Wallace Truman a long-awaited journey abroad, and turned the former President into a conspicuous ambassador of American goodwill. Over seven weeks they crossed Europe by train, from France and Italy through Austria and West Germany, then back through France, Brussels, the Netherlands, and England. The trip combined private travel with public recognition: its formal occasion was an honorary degree at the University of Oxford, but crowds repeatedly made the Trumans’ passage through European cities a public event.

Purpose and departure

Less than a month after Margaret Truman’s wedding, the former President and First Lady set off on what was described as their own honeymoon, and the finest trip of their lives. They had long hoped to travel abroad together. For Bess it was a first visit overseas; for Harry it was his third trip to Europe, but his first as a private citizen, and he was carrying his first passport. The invitation to accept an honorary degree at the University of Oxford had provided the stated occasion for a journey they had both dreamed of taking.

They left Independence on May 8, Harry’s seventy-second birthday. The departure nearly began with a mishap: while bringing the suitcases down from the attic that morning, he slipped on the stairs and twisted his ankle. It swelled dramatically, but he took a shiny black cane and continued, moving only a little more slowly than usual during the first few days. Friends and relatives gathered at the depot for a birthday send-off, where a cake was cut and passed around. The scene anticipated the crowds that would greet them throughout the tour: a family celebration at home became the opening moment of a journey that would seldom be private.

The Trumans sailed from New York aboard the United States with Stanley Woodward, Harry’s former chief of protocol, and Woodward’s wife, Sara. They landed at Le Havre and went by train to Paris. Rain accompanied much of the wider tour, but Harry recorded it as a passing inconvenience rather than a reason to curtail the trip. He remained determined to see as much as he could, while Bess tried to keep pace with an itinerary the account describes as exhausting even for people half their age.

A public journey through Europe

Paris brought together the traveler’s earlier life and his new status as a former President. On his first full day in the city, May 17, Harry sat at an outdoor table at the Café de la Paix near the Opéra, drinking coffee. He explained that he had been there during the First World War. At first, the people around him did not immediately turn their attention to him; soon, however, heads began to turn and passersby stopped to stare. A wire-service photograph showed him strolling through the Place de l’Opéra with his cane swinging like that of a boulevardier.

The press followed closely. Several hundred reporters had waited at the Gare Saint-Lazare for his arrival, and thereafter there were scarcely ever fewer than a dozen around him. The attention was not confined to journalists: people cheered him in the streets, and in Rome hundreds at the railway station shouted greetings, including Viva Truman and, in English, Hi, Harry. The party stayed at the Hassler Hotel at the head of the Spanish Steps. On a tour of Rome’s ancient monuments, Harry’s guide was Henry R. Luce, standing in for his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, the American ambassador to Italy, who had fallen ill. The two men sat together in the Colosseum, considering the vanished Roman Empire; elsewhere in Rome, Harry stopped on Capitol Hill, by the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, to introduce himself and shake hands with American tourists who had followed him.

The route continued north and west. In Brussels, The Hague, and Amsterdam, crowds gathered to cheer the Trumans at the 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 Soestdijk Palace. On June 17 they crossed the Channel by night boat to England, which Harry had most looked forward to visiting.

The itinerary also marked places he chose not to revisit. Although the tour included France, he did not return to the Vosges Mountains, the Argonne, or Verdun, wartime locations he apparently had no wish to see again. That omission sits alongside his visit to Paris, where the First World War remained part of his personal history: the tour could bring the past near without requiring him to retrace every battlefield.

Oxford and Chartwell

The ceremony at Oxford on June 20 was one of the occasions that meant most to Harry in a life already filled with public milestones. He had never attended college and had never pretended to be a scholar; now, wearing Oxford’s crimson robe and crushed black velour hat, he walked at the head of the procession beside the Public Orator. More than a thousand people gathered in the Sheldonian Theatre, designed by Christopher Wren and three centuries old. The ceremony, known as the Encaenia, was conducted in Latin. The Public Orator presented him as Harricum Truman, and the Earl of Halifax, Oxford’s chancellor and a former British ambassador to Washington, admitted him to the university’s fellowship with the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law. The honor joined an academic tradition to a career formed outside the university, making the procession itself a striking measure of how far his public life had carried him.

Four days later, at Chartwell, Harry and Winston Churchill met again. Churchill and his family, together with Lord Beaverbrook, waited in the driveway as the Trumans arrived in a chauffeur-driven Armstrong Siddeley. Harry greeted Churchill with a remark that made clear their meeting resumed an older familiarity. Inside, before a bronze bust of Franklin Roosevelt, the two men appeared to share a silent toast. After lunch they walked in the gardens, each carrying a walking stick. Harry recorded the visit as pleasant and happy, but also too brief. They parted without knowing whether they would meet again; they never did.

Reception and return

The welcome extended beyond individual stations and ceremonies. Lord Beaverbrook told Harry at Chartwell that the trip had made him America’s greatest ambassador of goodwill, and similar assessments followed. An English spectator reportedly remarked that Harry would win any election if he were campaigning in the United States. The London Evening Standard called the visit the Truman Triumph, while the Daily Telegraph presented him as a living symbol of what people liked best about the United States. The reception rested on the contrast between the grandeur surrounding a former President and the impression he made as an ordinary, jaunty traveler from Missouri. The account emphasizes that he charmed Europe not by adopting a grander persona, but by remaining himself.

The trip ended when the Trumans sailed home from Southampton on June 28. Its public success did not keep Harry from returning quickly to domestic politics: scarcely unpacked, he entered the effort to secure the Democratic presidential nomination for Averell Harriman rather than Adlai Stevenson. The European journey thus closed not in retirement from public affairs, but with renewed political activity. It left behind a record of personal travel, wartime memory, formal honor, and popular affection—and, at Chartwell, a final meeting with Churchill.