United States Secret Service

The United States Secret Service’s protection of Harry S. Truman grew from an improvised arrangement into a demanding operation shaped by his mobility, public accessibility, and disregard for his own safety. Its agents secured his journeys and residences, adjusted their methods as he moved through the presidency, and became familiar companions; after Truman left office, their return was something he and Bess Wallace Truman initially resisted.

A vice president without a settled security routine

Truman’s protection began with a gap. When he became vice president, no security arrangements had been made for him. Harry Vaughan, his military aide, regarded that omission as incongruous and pressed for a Secret Service assignment. George Drescher became the first Secret Service agent assigned to a vice president. At first Truman assumed Drescher was simply a friend of his driver, Tom Harty, who needed a lift. The new protective presence was sufficiently unfamiliar that it could pass unnoticed by its own protectee.

The gap was still evident on the evening Truman was summoned to the White House. He told Vaughan where he was going and asked him to keep it to himself, then hurried through evening traffic in the black Mercury with Harty driving. There was still no Secret Service guard with him. The episode gives the early arrangement its defining quality: the office had suddenly become more consequential, but the machinery of protecting its occupant had not yet caught up.

After Truman succeeded to the presidency, the change in his physical pace altered the agents’ work. Staff members accustomed to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s restricted mobility had been used to a president who could not move without them moving him. Truman, by contrast, walked quickly and might decide at any moment to leave for lunch on Capitol Hill or go elsewhere. Agents had to follow his initiative rather than manage a largely stationary president. His vigor required the Secret Service to revise both its expectations and its strategy.

That mobility appeared alongside a striking informality. On Truman’s first morning at the Executive Mansion, he stepped from the presidential Cadillac and invited Associated Press reporter Tony Vaccaro, who had been waiting outside his apartment, to ride with him. Such openness was part of the public manner that agents had to accommodate: protection could not simply keep Truman still or remove him from contact with people.

Protection on the move

The 1948 campaign made the logistical scale of presidential protection especially visible. Truman’s sixteen-car Presidential Special left Union Station on June 3. He traveled in the armor-plated Ferdinand Magellan, accompanied by White House staff, agents, and a press party of fifty-nine reporters and photographers, then a record for a presidential trip. The train’s movement demanded advance control well beyond the president’s own car.

The Secret Service checked every grade crossing in advance. A pilot train—one locomotive and one car—ran five miles ahead of the presidential train to absorb possible trouble. Crossings had to be manned, and switches spiked until the train had passed. The full entourage numbered about seventy when staff, agents, reporters, and photographers were counted. The train used the code name POTUS and received the right of way across the country. A journey that looked like campaigning was also a coordinated security operation extending along the route.

Protection could also shape the terms of ordinary political hospitality. At a reception at Samuel Rayburn’s white frame house, hundreds of guests waited in line across the front lawn. Worried about Truman’s safety, agents refused to let him stand in the receiving line unless they received the names of everyone present. Rayburn rejected that condition, insisting that he knew the people gathered there and would personally vouch for them. The exchange exposed a recurring tension: agents sought control through advance knowledge, while political hosts relied on personal trust and access.

At the Truman home on North Delaware Street, protection depended on routine as well as planning. During a shift change, the night detail arrived in a black Ford while the day shift prepared to return to Kansas City and its headquarters at the Muehlebach Hotel. A crowd had gathered outside. Truman went out through the kitchen and climbed into the back seat between agents Henry Nicholson and Gerard McCann; Frank Barry drove, with Jim Rowley, head of the detail, beside him. The car pulled away without attracting attention. The quiet departure illustrates how agents used ordinary-looking movements to manage a public setting without turning the president’s exit into a spectacle.

Exposure, vigilance, and personal familiarity

The move to Blair House presented a different kind of problem. The four-story building stood directly beside a busy avenue, with its front door only ten steps above street level and pedestrians passing throughout the day. Truman’s second-floor bedroom faced the street. Agents regarded the exposure as acute: whenever he emerged, he would be vulnerable. Protection had to account not only for a moving motorcade or a crowd, but also for the architecture and everyday traffic around the president’s home.

The Secret Service also investigated a threat that proved to be imagined. When Truman heard that James V. Forrestal believed foreign agents were following him, he asked Secret Service director U. E. Baughman to look into the matter. A report marked secret found Forrestal’s suspicions unfounded and described him as increasingly nervous and emotional. The episode shows the service acting as an investigative resource at Truman’s direction, while its report distinguished a perceived danger from one it could substantiate.

Truman did not, however, treat personal safety as an overriding concern. He liked the agents assigned to him, many of whom came from small towns or backgrounds like his own, and said he preferred them to the high-level officials around him. On morning walks he talked with the accompanying agents about their families, churches, military service, Missouri, and the Civil War. Rex Scouten recalled that Truman treated agents almost like sons. The relationship was not merely conversational: after learning that Floyd Boring’s wife had given birth, Truman arranged to visit her and the baby in the hospital.

After a shooting at the Truman home, the visible precautions increased sharply. While Bess and her mother were in another room, Agent Stuart Stout stood on duty at the open front door with a Thompson submachine gun. The following morning Truman set out for his usual walk at his brisk pace and told reporters that a president had to expect such things. The appearance of normal routine concealed a much larger detail: at least a dozen additional Secret Service men watched over him beyond the four immediately beside him, with others positioned ahead, across the street, or in a slowly moving car. The shooting had changed the protective deployment even as Truman’s public manner suggested continuity.

Protection after the presidency

The Secret Service returned to Truman’s life under a new arrangement after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Congress authorized protection for former presidents, and agents arrived in Independence. But when one introduced himself and said Truman would no longer need his own bodyguard, Mike Westwood, Truman dismissed him bluntly and told him to leave. Neither Truman nor Bess wanted the detail restored; Bess reacted as though the prospect meant another four years in the White House and would not allow agents onto the property.

President Lyndon B. Johnson eventually telephoned Bess and persuaded the Trumans to accept protection again. The agents resumed their watch, but Westwood continued accompanying Truman as before. The settlement preserved the pattern that had marked Truman’s relationship with the service throughout his public life: institutional protection remained necessary, yet he preferred familiar personal company to an impersonal security presence. For the agents, protecting him meant adapting to a president who moved quickly, welcomed people close, and did not readily organize his life around danger.