National Affairs: Sixth Degree

It was a sunny Sunday afternoon. As the four-motored Sacred Cow headed west from Washington's Boiling Field, the coal and railroad strikes, the food crisis, the failure of the Paris conference seemed left behind. Harry Truman was off on a 30-hour weekend in Missouri, his seventh trip away from Washington in 1946, his 16th since taking office.

At the Grandview, Mo. airport to meet him were his mother, who had been in bed with a cold, his brother, Vivian, and his sister, Mary Jane Truman. Visitors were banned. After a night in Kansas City's Muehlebach Hotel, the presidential party drove some 50...

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