At Norfolk Navy Yard last week shipwrights swarmed over a rakish gunboat, reconverting her into a presidential yacht for Harry Truman. She was the U.S.S. Williamsburg, lately with the Atlantic Fleet, before that a high-speed convoy flagship based in Iceland.
When she is commissioned, in about two months, the Williamsburg will be the sixth in her line. In the Republic's first struggling century, U.S. Presidents went yachtless. But in 1893, as the head of a rising naval power, Grover Cleveland took to cruising aboard the gunboat Dolphin. McKinley sailed in the Sylph, and by the time Roosevelt I took over the hefty (2,690-ton) Mayflower, a yacht was considered standard office equipment for a President.
For three decades, until Herbert Hoover laid her up to save money, presidential guests marveled at the Mayflower's black bathtub, carved from a single block of Italian marble (it was too small for outsize William Howard Taft). The Mayflower burned and sank in 1931, was salvaged, served in World War II as a Navy and Coast Guard training ship.
In early New Deal days Franklin Roosevelt cruised about on Vincent Aster's palatial Nourmahal. Then he acquired the Sequoia, switched to the Potomac in 1936 after the Navy condemned the Sequoia as a firetrap. The topheavy Potomac made many a weekend trip on which FDR regaled his guests with drink and stories. But she rolled like a barrel—which never bothered FDR but sent many a guest to the rail.
The 244-ft. Wittiamsburg is a 14-year-old, twin-screw, diesel-powered ocean yacht once known as the Aras and owned by Maine Paper Manufacturer Hugh J. Chisholm. President Truman will have two double staterooms on the boat deck. One will have gold draperies, oyster-white leather chairs, blue walls; the other will be done in beige and green. There will be peach carpeting in the lounge, beige in the messroom. The presidential "head" will include a bathtub; guest staterooms will have showers. On the fantail Harry Truman and guests can relax under awnings, in lounge chairs. He will be free to give her any name he chooses, but the Navy thinks Williamsburg a "nice Colonial name" and hopes it will stick.