AT THE START OF Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, Americans thought it was too dangerous for a president to fly. Besides, they felt that their leader belonged in the White House and should stay there, especially in times of crisis.
No president had traveled abroad until Theodore Roosevelt sailed to Panama in 1906. But he used an American ship and stayed outside U.S. waters for only a few hours, specifically to tamp down criticism at home. Woodrow Wilson wasn’t so careful. He traveled by ship to the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, spending several weeks away from Washington, and caused a furor that helped to undermine his leadership. Many Americans thought their president should never stray from the United States, and Wilson’s venture—trying to organize a new political order in Europe and create a League of Nations—was not a popular mission to start with.
Franklin Roosevelt changed the whole dynamic. In fact, the act of flying showed Roosevelt to be not only a daring individual, but also a creative and pragmatic thinker, willing to give new things a try, just as he was in so many other areas.
The Depression and World War II had shaken America to its core, and Roosevelt felt he had to project confidence and effectiveness. So he emphasized a spirit of jaunty optimism as much as possible, and flying was part of his mystique. It served notice that the president would do whatever it took to get his job done, and Americans appreciated that.
On January 11, 1943, he became the first chief executive to travel by air when he boarded a hulking, prop-driven Pan Am Dixie Clipper, nicknamed the “Flying Boat,” for a secret meeting with Winston Churchill in Casablanca. His mood was upbeat. “He was about to see a new continent, Churchill, combat troops,” wrote historian James MacGregor Burns. “And he would travel by plane for the first time since his famous flight to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1932 [before he was elected]. He would be the first president to fly, the first to leave the United States in wartime, and the first since Lincoln to visit an active theater of war. To take a trip, to enter a war zone, to create precedents—no combination of events could make Roosevelt happier.”
Privately, he expressed concern that an airplane moved so fast that he would not be able to enjoy the sojourn at his leisure. “I’m in no hurry,” he said. “The sooner I get where I’m going, the sooner people will be wanting something from me.” Like so many men and women of wealth and power at this time, he saw travel as a respite, a way to escape the burdens of his job, rather than a way to get things done en route to his destination, which is the way modern workaholic presidents view their time on Air Force One.
FDR had an additional problem. Despite his vigorous public persona, his legs were paralyzed from polio, and air travel was a hardship. At 6 feet, 2 inches tall and 188 pounds, he would have been uncomfortable in the relatively small airplane cabins of the day under any circumstances. But he felt doubly confined when he had to spend long periods of time without the opportunity to move around freely by wheelchair or on crutches, as he could on a train or a ship. Roosevelt also found it difficult to conduct his famous monologues above the roar of propellers and engines.
Finally, he never forgot that pre-presidential flight to the Democratic convention in 1932, when storms buffeted the plane and threw a scare into the passengers. For all these reasons, Roosevelt made only three trips by plane during his more than 12 years in office. He used an aircraft only when he considered it absolutely necessary.
But he felt that the Casablanca trip was one of those times. The outcome of World War II was very much in doubt, and Roosevelt believed he needed to sit down face-to-face with Churchill to better understand the British leader and to plan out the long-range Allied campaign in Europe. The military decided that going by ship was too dangerous because German submarines were lurking all across the Atlantic. The brass also concluded that few people expected the president to fly, so FDR would have the element of surprise on his side. And Casablanca was a totally unexpected site.
The trip, described later by pilot Howard Cone, provided a glimpse into FDR’s gregarious personality and his everyday challenges as a polio victim. Typically, he made the best of it. Eleanor, his wife, often remarked that Franklin had learned patience and empathy during his grueling struggle against polio, which he contracted as an adult, and these traits were on display during the airborne trip.
First, the president traveled under utmost secrecy from Washington to Miami by train. After takeoff at dawn from Dinner Key in South Florida, Roosevelt changed into an open-collar shirt, a sweater, and baggy slacks, and began eagerly looking out the window at the azure waters off South Florida’s Atlantic coast. He kept track of the plane’s position with navigation charts that he spread out before him on a small table in the passenger cabin. He called over a steward and pointed out a spot where he had once gone deep-sea fishing during a vacation trip, and reminisced about how much he loved being on the water with friends. He also kept track of the Atlantic Clipper, the Dixie Clipper’s sister seaplane, which was flying close by, filled with military and government officials and a contingent of Secret Service agents. As the flight progressed, he remarked on the jungle of what was then Dutch Guiana, the Amazon River, and the merchant ships near the Brazilian port of Belem.
The seaplanes first flew 1,633 miles in 10 hours from the Miami area to Port of Spain, Trinidad, where everyone spent the night ashore. Next morning, the two clippers droned 1,227 miles in eight hours southeast along the coast of South America to Belem, Brazil. Roosevelt read, napped, and played solitaire. After a three-hour layover to refuel and service the plane at Belem, the Flying Boats swung eastward across the South Atlantic on a 2,500-mile, 15-hour flight to Bathurst in what was then British Gambia, near Dakar. Roosevelt and his entourage then boarded two C-54 prop planes, one of which had been outfitted with ramps so his wheelchair could be pushed easily into the aircraft. They proceeded for another 1,500 miles over nine hours to Casablanca.
Otis F. Bryan, the pilot on the final overland leg, later recalled that Roosevelt asked many questions about the geographical features below as the North African landscape rolled beneath him. “He didn’t ask for special privileges,” Bryan said. “In fact, we removed several seats to make him a bed, but he preferred to sit up and stay awake because the others in the plane didn’t have similar conveniences.”
Roosevelt spent 10 days in Casablanca planning the Allied invasion of Europe. He took a few extra days to visit Liberia, home to thousands of former slaves from America, and meet with President Edwin James Barclay. He disembarked in Brazil to see President Getulio Dornelles Vargas and to review U.S. troops at the Natal air base, stopped again at Port of Spain, Trinidad, and flew back to Miami.
For the final leg from Trinidad to Florida, the Dixie Clipper’s staff prepared a special meal for the president to celebrate his 61st birthday—caviar, turkey, potatoes, peas, coffee, and a big cake, all brought aboard at Port of Spain. Roosevelt loved being the center of attention, and he cut the cake himself with a small metal spatula as he sat at a cramped table covered with white linen. Fleet Admiral W. D. Leahy sat to his right, adviser Harry Hopkins was directly across from him, and pilot Howard Cone sat across from Leahy. FDR carved big slices with gusto and handed the dessert to each staffer and crew member aboard.
As amazing as it is to ponder today, with our 24-hour news cycles and media ubiquity, the president’s trip was kept secret until Roosevelt decided to reveal it at the end of the journey. There were no leaks and no intrusive reporters in tow, only the president and his cast of white, middle-aged, male advisers, assistants, and military and security personnel. (Diversity was not a priority in the America of the 1940s.)
Roosevelt made the trip in what would today be considered an eternity—three days of travel, including 42 hours in the air each way. Nowadays it would take about eight hours to fly the 3,875 miles from Washington to Casablanca. And the president was exhausted by the experience. He developed a fever on the way home and, as the engines roared with incessant background noise, wrote his wife, Eleanor, that, “All has gone well though I’m a bit tired—too much plane. It affects my head just as ocean cruising affects yours.”
In her memoirs, Eleanor, who loved to fly, wrote, “It was his first long trip by air across the water and I had hoped he would be won over to flying, but instead he disliked it more than ever and much preferred travel by ship. I tried to tell him that the clouds could be as interesting as waves, but he always said: ‘You can have your clouds. They bore me after a certain length of time.’”
Still, the first presidential trip by air was liberating. It was all the more impressive to Americans because Roosevelt seemed truly courageous to have made the journey at all. It was, after all, only 16 years since Charles Lindbergh had startled the world with his solo nonstop flight from New York to Paris aboard the Spirit of St. Louis.
FDR made two more trips by plane—to Teheran and Yalta—demonstrating that from then on, no president would be limited by the innate slowness of ground or water transportation.
In 1944, Roosevelt had a Douglas C-54 Skymaster four-engine prop plane, later nicknamed the “Sacred Cow” by an irreverent press corps, converted for his exclusive use. The redesign included a wheelchair lift in the belly of the aircraft. The tinny, gray-colored contraption resembled an old-style telephone booth, but it was only four feet tall and could barely accommodate the president in his wheelchair. The lift was raised from the ground into the plane’s belly electrically, then a door neatly folded over the opening so that an outsider would never realize the wheelchair compartment existed. Roosevelt didn’t want anyone beyond his inner circle to know of his affliction, and he didn’t want any spies to figure out which plane he was on.
The Sacred Cow also had a small, rectangular bulletproof window in the president’s 7.5-by-12-foot stateroom in the aft compartment, where it was quietest. The room contained a single chair for the commander in chief, a small desk, and a two-seat couch. Across the narrow aisle were seats for seven and a sofa that opened into a bed; a drape could be pulled across the bed for privacy. The plane was furnished with upholstery of blue wool. Draperies at the windows were of blue gabardine, embroidered with the insignia of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard.
There was a primitive galley and a crew of seven. The flight attendants were nicknamed “hotcuppers” because they used electric devices to heat coffee, soup, and other beverages in cups, an indication of the basic nature of service by today’s standards.
FDR managed to use the Sacred Cow on only one trip before his death. He took an airborne hop from Malta to Yalta after crossing the Atlantic aboard the heavy cruiser Quincy in February 1945. At Yalta he met with Soviet leader Josef Stalin and Britain’s Churchill to plan the endgame of World War II and consider the shape of the post-war world. Roosevelt then flew on the Sacred Cow from Yalta to Cairo, where he boarded the Quincy for his voyage home.
Future presidents would make far more use of the flying White House. Over the next half century, as technology advanced, presidential aircraft progressed with it, extending the reach of the leader of the free world more than anyone imagined was possible when FDR became the first commander in chief to fly.
UNLIKE ROOSEVELT, HARRY Truman loved to travel by air, and the way he did it reflected his feisty personality and his down-to-earth approach to life. Also unlike Roosevelt, whose planes were unadorned and designed not to stand out so spies and other outsiders wouldn’t know he was aboard, Truman wanted everyone to know he was there. He and his advisers had the front of his plane, the Independence, painted to resemble the head of an eagle, complete with yellow beak (quickly repainted white because the yellow interfered with radio signals and visibility) and blue tail feathers on the rear of the fuselage.
In fact, Truman flew so often that he reassured many Americans that air travel was a safe, convenient way to move around the country. If the president was comfortable doing it, it must be a good thing—and why not the rest of us?
Actually, Truman had not taken to flying naturally. He rode his first airplane in the 1920s in a World War I-era biplane, and when it landed in a farm field, he walked over to a fence and vomited. His mother also had a bit of trouble when Truman sent the Sacred Cow to pick her up, along with his sister, Mary Jane, in Grandview, Missouri, to visit Washington for Mother’s Day 1945. It was her first plane trip. “Mama got a great kick out of the trip,” Truman recalled in his memoirs. “The only thing she did not like was her experience with the elevator [the one specially installed to accommodate Roosevelt]. When the plane landed and she was being taken down, the elevator stuck. It had to be pulled back to get her out. She turned to Colonel Myers, the pilot, and said: ‘I am going to tell Harry that this plane is no good and I could walk just as easily as I could ride.’”
But such glitches aside, Truman picked up where FDR left off, as he did in so many other areas. Truman made his first flight on the Sacred Cow on May 5, 1945, less than a month after taking office upon Roosevelt’s death. That day trip from Washington to Kansas City—to visit his home in nearby Independence—was the first domestic flight for any president. And it showed that Truman had no qualms about breaking with tradition if he thought it was appropriate.
Truman was the first president to fly routinely. On June 19, 1945, he traveled to the West Coast and stopped in Olympia, Washington, for some politicking, fishing, and sightseeing. His main goal was to attend a ceremony in San Francisco adopting the United Nations charter. In a letter to his mother and sister on June 22, shortly after he arrived in Olympia, he revealed that the pace was wearing: “Dear Mama & Mary,” he wrote, “Well, we arrived safely day before yesterday … after twelve-and-a-half hours continuous flying. Rather rough on the last end because of sunshine on plowed fields. Have been going at a terrific gait all the time.”
In his memoirs, Truman summed it up:
I had always been in the habit of making my own traveling arrangements—driving my own car, buying my own railroad tickets, carrying my own bags—but as President none of these things was possible. I had to do a great deal of traveling as President, but wherever I went I was accompanied by at least a part of the executive branch of the government. There was never a time when I could not be reached immediately by Washington. To facilitate this, special communications arrangements had to be made, and I always had to have staff assistants with me.
For the Potsdam conference, Cabinet officers, ambassadors, the Chiefs of Staff, the White House staff, the State Department, the Army, Navy, and the Air Force, the Treasury and the Secret Service, all had a share in the working out of arrangements. Many of them had to take part in the work of the conference. The White House, in a sense, had to be moved to Potsdam for the duration of the conference.
The President of the United States can never escape being a public figure, and when he travels, Secret Service agents travel ahead of him to inspect the route that he will follow, the vehicles he is to use, and the buildings he intends to enter.
This was a good summary of a president’s needs on the road at the time. And the demands of presidential travel have become far more rigorous and extensive in the succeeding years.
In July, Truman made his first foreign trip when he visited Germany for the Potsdam Conference with Stalin and Churchill. He reluctantly agreed to use his plane only for the final leg from Brussels to Berlin because he wanted the extra time aboard ship to read his briefing memos and think about the post-war world. “I decided to make the journey aboard a naval vessel,” Truman wrote, “since I felt I would be better able aboard ship to study the many documents that had been assembled for my information. There would be an opportunity as well to consult with my advisers without interference by the usual White House routine. And I needed to have uninterrupted communications with Washington for transacting government business and to keep in touch with London and Moscow. Arrangements had to be closely coordinated with the preparations of the British and the Russians, and exchanges of messages were a continuing process.”
Today, of course, the president has no such concerns, because Air Force One has the latest in communications and there is plenty of room to accommodate the senior staff and scores of other officials. A president also may order use of as many backup planes as he wants, and often hundreds of U.S. officials, aides, guests, and journalists travel with him. But in Truman’s time, as for FDR before him and Dwight Eisenhower after him, flying was basically a way to get somewhere as fast as possible, and not yet a full extension of the Oval Office.
Still, Truman made good use of his three-and-a-half-hour flight to Berlin that July. For part of the route from Kassel to Magdeburg, he wrote later, “Those two cities, as viewed from the air, appeared to be completely destroyed. I could not see a single house that was left standing in either town.”
No other president had ever experienced this aerial view of the devastation of war—the flattened homes, the destroyed bridges, roads, and railroad lines, the burned-out factories, the craters from months of Allied bombing, all testaments to the misery being felt by desperate people trying to get on with their lives. Truman never forgot it as he pushed for programs to rebuild Germany and Japan after the conflict ended.
For the remainder of his nearly eight years in the White House, Truman flew whenever he could because it made travel so easy. And sometimes he “lent” his plane to other leaders, including Churchill and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the Chinese leader, and to key advisers such as Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and his successor, Dean Acheson, and General Dwight Eisenhower, then the supreme Allied commander in Europe.
The end of World War II and the onset of the atomic age and the cold war brought a new set of challenges. Europe needed to be reconstructed, Communism contained, and the economy rejuvenated. Underlying all the other problems, there were widespread doubts whether Truman, largely unknown to the public and with a rather ordinary record in the Senate before he was named Roosevelt’s vice president, was up to the job. As vice president, he had been kept out of the loop by his boss. He never was told about the development of the atomic bomb until he succeeded to the presidency. Within a year, he had ordered two of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Truman would use the president’s aircraft to demonstrate this same kind of decisiveness.
He was, in fact, the first president to use the plane to enhance his stature. He had been sensitive for many years about his unimposing presence; he was 5 feet, 9 inches tall and weighed 167 pounds—by no means a small man—but his thick eyeglasses, slight build, and colloquial way of speaking seemed to minimize him as a public figure. And when he succeeded Roosevelt, he was widely criticized for being an accidental president who could never fill FDR’s shoes.
Partly as a way to enhance his image, he publicized his travel schedule as widely as possible—a technique that every one of his successors has used. This guaranteed Truman huge amounts of publicity and built up his image as a hardworking, activist leader who loved to be among the people. His “whistle-stop” train trips during his 1948 campaign have received nearly all the attention from historians but his air travel was also important because it immeasurably expanded his reach. Truman and his advisers were quick to realize that Americans wanted their president to avoid the isolation of Washington once the war was over and pay more attention to their everyday concerns. He also knew that modern leadership required a president to meet with his counterparts around the globe, from Potsdam to the South Pacific. That’s what he did.
IN 1946, TRUMAN’S advisers told him the Sacred Cow had become outmoded. Military and security officials wanted the president to travel on a new, four-engine, prop-driven Douglas DC-6, with more power, more range, more effective radar and communications, and better amenities than Roosevelt’s plane. Truman agreed.
With its four propeller engines, it was capable of a cruising speed of 315 miles per hour and a maximum speed of 358 mph, and had a range of 4,400 miles without refueling. The DC-6 also had a state-of-the-art cabin pressurization system—a big improvement over the oxygen bottles that the crew lugged onto FDR’s plane for the first presidential flight in 1943.
Just as impressive, the plane contained a more-spacious presidential suite in its 67-foot cabin, which was decorated in dark brown, dark blue, light gray, and tan. The suite contained a large swivel chair that reclined, a table for eight, three windows, and an elk-hide sofa that converted to a full-sized bed. It could carry 25 passengers and had sleeping berths for 12. As with Roosevelt and, later, Eisenhower, the presidential stateroom was placed at the rear of the aircraft to minimize noise from the four engines (a tradition that lasted until Richard Nixon redesigned Air Force One and placed the presidential compartment at the front; by then, the forward section, beyond the jet engines, was quieter and more stable in flight).
Naming the aircraft caused more than a few problems. “Pentagon officials had never liked the name an irreverent press corps had bestowed upon the first presidential plane,” wrote authors J. F. terHorst and Ralph Albertazzie. “The brass thought it frivolous for a president of the United States to arrive anywhere, especially a foreign capital, aboard an airplane dubbed the ‘Sacred Cow.’ … Senior Air Force officials wanted to call it the Flying White House, the name originally intended for the Sacred Cow. At least it was a dignified name and it expressed the purpose of the craft. But that too ran into resistance from the pragmatists. The Flying White House had not caught on with the first presidential airplane; what reason was there to believe it would be acceptable this time?”
In the end, Truman took the suggestion of his pilot, Hank Myers, and christened the DC-6 Independence, in honor of his hometown in Missouri and the feeling it gave him when he used it.
Truman took his first flight on the Independence in September 1947, for a trip to Rio de Janeiro where he attended an Inter-American Defense Conference. He kept watch on a compass, altimeter, and speedometer installed in the executive cabin to satisfy his curiosity about where he was and how high and fast he was flying. He enjoyed wandering the plane to chat with aides, greet guests, stretch his legs, and schmooze with the crew in the cockpit.
TRUMAN AND HIS advisers were savvy enough to use the plane itself as a power tool. Part of that effort was painting the aircraft to resemble the eagle. This would seem cartoonish today but it worked in Truman’s era. In effect, he invented the use of the president’s plane as a modern spectacle. In nearly every city he visited, Americans would show up at the airport to watch the president arrive, and they loved to read about it in their hometown newspapers. It was front-page news. It still is.
There was a similar awe among foreign leaders, and it continues to this day. Prime ministers and potentates the world over respect and envy the American president’s power and prestige, and the airborne White House symbolizes those traits in a vivid way. Truman understood that people loved to come aboard, hoping to bask in the reflected glory, and he brought guests with him whenever possible so they could spread the word about the rare honor of flying with the commander in chief.
And the awe was not just confined to the guests; the president experienced it, too, in those early days of presidential flight. Truman, a prolific and eloquent writer, turned almost poetic when he recalled his flight across the Pacific to confer with General Douglas MacArthur in October 1950: “I had breakfast and then went forward again and sat in the second pilot’s seat as we approached the Hawaiian Islands. It was still dark, but at regular intervals the lights of ships could be seen below. These were the destroyers the Navy had stationed along my route—just in case a mishap occurred to the plane. Colonel Williams, the pilot, said that visibility was exceptionally fine that morning; in any case, I had a breath-taking view of the entire chain of islands rising slowly out of the western sky, tiny little dark points in a vastness of blue that I would not have believed if I had not seen it myself. Then slowly the specks of land took shape and were distinct islands. At last the plane passed Diamond Head, circled low over Pearl Harbor, and came in for a landing at Hickam Air Force Base.”
Finally, like all his successors, Truman considered his plane a refuge where he could be himself. He sometimes savored a snort or two of bourbon and water, and enjoyed playing poker and other card games with his aides.
He was the first chief executive to watch television aboard the presidential aircraft. It was installed in his quarters in time for his July 25, 1952, flight to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He and Mrs. Truman watched his party begin the roll-call vote that nominated Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson as the standard-bearer against Eisenhower that fall.
Truman felt so uninhibited aboard the plane that he indulged his penchant for earthiness and practical jokes. He once told his pilot, Myers, that whenever he flew to Independence, he was to be notified as soon as the plane reached Ohio. This was the home state of Republican senator Robert A. Taft, his political nemesis. When the plane crossed into Ohio, the president would get up from his seat and use the bathroom in the rear of the aircraft, then order Myers over the intercom to release the waste into the air. It was Harry’s way of demeaning Taft.
On one occasion, he ordered Myers to buzz the White House, a risk that no president would dare to take today. But Truman couldn’t resist. On Sunday, May 19, 1946, he suddenly decided to fly home to Independence again to visit his elderly mother. He departed with only two Secret Service agents and the plane crew, leaving the press behind. As the plane took off, Truman caught a glimpse of an air show featuring new jet aircraft that was going on nearby. Thousands of people were on the ground watching the latest-model P-80 fighter planes maneuver in the skies just outside Washington. The observers included, he realized, his wife, Bess, and daughter, Margaret, who had planned to watch from the White House roof. “Could we dive on them?” the commander in chief asked his pilot playfully. “… like a jet fighter? I’ve always wanted to try something like that.”
Pilot Myers agreed, even though it was against air security regulations and common sense. As the president strapped himself into his seat, Myers turned the plane toward the west. With the four engines at full throttle, the Sacred Cow dove straight for the White House and dropped down to 500 feet as it roared over the roof. Truman waved from his window and laughed uproariously. He ordered another run, and the plane circled and swooped down again to 500 feet. At this point, Bess and Margaret recovered from their initial shock at being dive-bombed and realized the president was giving them a special show. They began jumping and waving, and Truman was delighted with himself.
It was no laughing matter for the military, the local police, and the Secret Service. At one point, the Service thought someone had stolen the president’s plane, and officials frantically made calls to find out what was happening. Finally, the Air Force reached the Sacred Cow by radio, and Myers explained that the president was aboard and had ordered the stunt. That’s where the matter ended. The commander in chief had his prerogatives, after all, and Truman saw nothing wrong with taking advantage of them to make a little mischief.
As his presidency proceeded, Truman spent increasing amounts of time on his plane ruminating about the problems he faced. There was no more important example of this than his setting the groundwork, during a flight in June 1950, for U.S. involvement in the Korean War.
At about 10 P.M. on Saturday, June 24, he was in Independence, Missouri, for a weekend with his family, sitting in the library of their home on North Delaware Street, when Secretary of State Dean Acheson telephoned with news that the North Koreans had invaded South Korea. Acheson suggested asking the United Nations Security Council to immediately declare that the North Koreans had committed an act of aggression, and Truman agreed.
Acheson called again the following morning at about 11:30, “just as we were getting ready to sit down to an early Sunday dinner,” Truman recalled in his memoirs. The secretary of state said the situation was increasingly grave; the North Koreans showed no signs of slowing their all-out invasion. Truman decided to fly back to Washington as soon as possible.
The crew of his plane had the aircraft ready in less than an hour, and the president departed so quickly that two of his aides were left behind. Truman observed:
The plane left the Kansas City Municipal Airport at two o’clock, and it took just a little over three hours to make the trip to Washington. I had time to think aboard the plane. In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had attacked the weak. I recalled some earlier instances: Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria. I remembered how each time that the democracies failed to act it had encouraged the aggressors to keep going ahead. Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall, Communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores… . If this was allowed to go unchallenged it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on the second world war.
This line of thinking became the basis for Truman’s intervention in the Korean conflict.
Over the years, he also took some historic actions while airborne. On July 27, 1947, for example, he signed the National Security Act, which created the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, and established the Air Force as a separate branch of the military services.
On the lighter side, Truman had no qualms about using the plane for personal trips. He not only would fly to his hometown periodically but would also visit Key West, Florida, for vacations. Sometimes his critics objected but most Americans didn’t seem to mind. They gave their industrious leader plenty of slack in those difficult times. Presidents have followed his lead ever since, using Air Force One for all manner of R and R. In all, Truman made 61 flights and logged 135,098 air miles as president.
REPUBLICAN DWIGHT EISENHOWER pledged to bring a “new broom” to Washington when he took office in January 1953, and he swept out Truman’s Independence along with the Democrats who had run the government for 20 years. Ike chose as his regular aircraft a four-engine, prop-driven Lockheed Constellation similar to the C-121 he used as supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe in 1950 and 1951. He called the sturdy silver plane Columbine II, for the official flower of Colorado, his wife’s home state. (He had first used the nickname “Columbine” for his Lockheed Constellation C-121 transport while he was still an Army general.)
In November 1954, at the end of his second year in the White House, he began using a third Constellation, this time a faster, longer-range, stretch version of the Lockheed 1049C, which became Columbine III. The 1049C could cruise at 355 mph, slightly faster than Truman’s plane, and had a range of 3,500 miles, less than Truman’s, although it could fly at higher altitudes, enabling it to avoid many storms and other turbulent weather patterns, and it was a bit roomier.
In Ike’s America, everything was about normalcy after the turmoil and hardship of the Depression and World War II, the divisions and disappointments over the Korean War, and the strains of the cold war. Ike’s approach to his plane reflected that attitude.
Eisenhower, like Truman, loved to fly. In addition, he was a pilot during his military career—experienced mostly in light aircraft—and had even more of an appreciation for aircraft than his predecessor. He took a special interest in redesigning the Columbine II into the Columbine III to meet his needs, complete with a sophisticated display panel of navigational instruments so he could keep track of the plane’s progress. He had two clocks installed above his bed, one to show the time in Washington and one at his destination.
The plane, decorated in a drab color scheme of gray, blue, and green, had two couches, two single beds, and a large bathroom/dressing room in the presidential cabin. Eisenhower ordered two big leather easy chairs installed for himself and the First Lady, whom he expected to fly with him as often as possible, even though Mamie did not like air travel at first. This was a dislike she shared with Bess Truman, who preferred to stay home while her husband gallivanted around the world. But Mamie got over her phobia. During the course of traveling 22,000 miles in Eisenhower’s first presidential year, she finally came to trust the pilot, Bill Draper, and his crew, who reassured her that flying was safer than car travel.
Ike preferred flying to all other forms of transportation, and flew 308,402 miles during the eight years of his presidency—more than double Truman’s total. He saw air travel as the fastest way to get from one point to another, not as a regular extension of the Oval Office, so he rarely made big decisions on the plane. But sometimes it did happen. He finished his “Atoms for Peace” speech to the United Nations, outlining the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, while aboard the plane in December 1953, less than a year after he took office. It was a hectic experience, especially since he had to ask his pilot to circle Manhattan for an extra half hour while copies were mimeographed and stapled together on board. He later told aides he didn’t want to leave such things to the last minute again.
True to his military background and the habits of many men of his era, he was a disciplined and compliant passenger. He kept his seat belt fastened throughout every flight and rarely visited the cockpit, as Truman liked to do. Nor did Ike wander the aisles chatting with aides or dignitaries. When he wanted to see someone, the old general sent for him. He didn’t drink nearly as much as Truman and didn’t like the naughty stories that Truman enjoyed.
Sometimes he slurped his soup directly from the bowl, in his homespun Kansas way, which even his most cultured guests often felt compelled to emulate, giving the crew a good, if private, laugh. Yet Ike never suffered a diminishment in stature over such incidents. He was, after all, the former supreme commander of the Allies in Europe and had led them in the Normandy invasion. At nearly 5 feet, 11 inches and 170 pounds, with the bearing of a general, he had a dignified demeanor that held him in good stead as a public figure.
Befitting a man accustomed to the chain of command, Ike took the pilot’s advice almost as a direct order. After all, the captain was in charge, and according to military tradition, his word was law aboard his aircraft. Bill Draper would even tell the president when to go to bed on long flights to keep his body clock in order. Returning to Washington from a Colorado vacation in September 1953 to attend the funeral of Chief Justice Fred Vinson, the pilot told Eisenhower to get some sleep soon after the 9-P.M. takeoff. It was 11 P.M. in Washington, Draper said, and would be a good time for the president to “relax.” Without hesitation, the commander in chief replied, “Okay, Bill,” and went to sleep.
Also reflecting the formality of the fifties, Ike almost never worked in shirtsleeves. He would remove his business suit coat as soon as he boarded but would quickly don a tweed jacket and rarely loosened his tie.
Under Ike, the president’s plane returned to its Roosevelt-era unadorned state. Gone was the eagle motif of Truman’s Independence, and in its place was a simple gray, utilitarian, military-style aircraft. The only concession to flamboyance was the red, white, and blue stripes on the very end of each propeller blade, and they were mainly designed to make the whirring blades highly visible so no one walked into them.
Ike embodied the no-nonsense spirit of the cold war, and the plane reflected the man and his times. A big, gray safe was added to store secret documents on the plane. Ike allowed virtually no photographs released to the press of him or his staff on the aircraft. He thought this was frivolous and could conceivably reveal something important to the Communists. He ordered a motion-picture projector that contained a small screen placed opposite his desk so he could view Pentagon and State Department briefings on film at his convenience. He had a big radio installed over the pillow in his berth so he could pick up news and occasionally music while he was lying down.
Ike would enjoy a martini or two once he got settled, to relax. He generally did some paperwork and talked policy with aides on board, but sometimes sipped his drinks alone and read the latest Western novels, which the staff stocked in his cabin.
One thing that Ike wouldn’t forgo was the use of his plane to take frequent holidays, a tradition that continues to this day with George W. Bush’s repeated trips to his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Eisenhower was the subject of criticism for his trips to play golf, fish, or shoot quail at various locations, including Augusta, Newport, Denver, and his farm in Gettysburg. His pleasure jaunts prompted Democratic National Chairman Paul M. Butler to complain that Ike was a “part-time president” who spent too much time away from Washington. This was a delicate matter, since many Americans sympathized with Eisenhower’s need to take it easy because of his heart problems. “We say,” said Butler, “that aside from his health, aside from his illness, the president has been absent from the White House more than any other president in the last 24 years.” The country didn’t much care.
IT WAS DURING Ike’s era that the name Air Force One was first used by the military to identify any Air Force plane carrying the president. It started after a potentially dangerous mixup.
Columbine II, known as Air Force 610, was carrying Eisenhower to Florida when air traffic controllers briefly confused it with Eastern 610, an Eastern Airlines plane on a commercial flight in the same area. Ike was never in danger but Draper, his pilot, decided from then on to call the president’s plane Air Force One, and the name stuck. No other aircraft has a similar name.
WHAT TRULY GAVE the presidency its global reach was the advent of jet aircraft. Commercial airline companies were already adding jets to their fleets by the late 1950s, and the Pentagon was converting to jets for its fighters, bombers, and transports. The civilian government wanted to do the same. Adding to the sense of urgency, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Eisenhower that the prestige of the United States suffered whenever the commander in chief arrived for an international meeting in a prop-driven plane while Soviet officials and other dignitaries were showing up in jets.
Eisenhower didn’t need much convincing. He became the first president to travel by jet—a four-engine Boeing 707, known in military parlance as a VC-137A, that was part of the government VIP fleet—on August 26, 1959, about 17 months before he left office. Nicknamed “Queenie,” it had a special communications cabin in the forward section, in front of a passenger compartment holding eight seats. Next was a center cabin featuring a table, swivel chairs, divans that converted to beds, and a film projector. The rear compartment had another 14 seats, for a total of 40 passengers.
Ike walked onto what he called “the strange jet airplane” at 3:20 A.M. and showed his wife around “the mammoth machine.” He later wrote:
Both in size and speed the new airplane completely dwarfed the Columbine, the Super Constellation that we had long considered the last word in luxurious transportation. However, no airplane ever looked attractive to Mamie… .
I settled back in my compartment with the Secretary of State and underwent an exhilarating experience, that of my first jet flight, with its silent, effortless acceleration and its rapid rate of climb. The deep coloring of the sunrise, seen from a height of thirty-five thousand feet, was an unforgettable sight.
After refueling at Newfoundland, he arrived in Bonn, Germany, at 6:30 P.M. and met with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, then flew to London to chat with British prime minister Harold Macmillan and visit Queen Elizabeth. He moved on to Paris to talk with French president Charles de Gaulle, and finally dropped in at Ayreshire, Scotland, for some golf. He returned to Washington on September 7. Ike loved the experience. He told aides the ride was remarkably smooth and the speed very impressive. He covered 8,711 miles in 19 hours and 27 minutes. As historian Stephen E. Ambrose wrote, “He was hooked.”
The jet opened up new vistas for the White House, as it did for a nation in which, during the late 1950s, only one out of 10 Americans had ever been aboard an aircraft. Using prop-driven planes for his first seven years as president, Eisenhower had averaged 120 hours of flying time and traveled 30,000 miles annually. In 1960, using the jet aircraft, Ike flew 193 hours and covered 78,677 miles—spending an additional 73 hours in the air on an annual basis but covering more than two and a half times the distance.
Technology now enabled the president of the United States to become an international traveler without peer, and no spot on the globe would be too far away for him to visit conveniently. This fit perfectly with Eisenhower’s own instincts. “Travel, just for its own sake, had always been one of Eisenhower’s chief delights,” wrote Ambrose. “There were many places he wanted to see—most especially India—and he had been compiling a mental list of the sites he intended to visit after retirement. But how much nicer to visit them while he was still President, and could use Air Force One, and—best of all—could use his prestige and position to further the cause of peace, to which he had committed himself and his administration.”
Ike showed just how far things had progressed. Starting December 3, 1959, he rode his jet to the Vatican and in nearly three weeks made a world tour that covered Rome; Ankara, Turkey; Karachi, Pakistan; Kabul, Afghanistan; New Delhi, India; Teheran, Iran; Athens, Greece; Tunis, Tunisia; Paris; Madrid; and Casablanca in Morocco. The extent of the trip was seen as an illustration of Ike’s leadership. “The President, who has often said he would go anywhere, any time, and meet anyone if by doing so he could further the cause of honorable world peace, is about to demonstrate this resolve more dramatically and with a greater expenditure of physical effort than ever before since he entered the White House,” wrote Arthur Krock in The New York Times on November 8, 1959. “Moreover, no Western statesman has embarked on a peace mission of such magnitude, and most nations in this itinerary have never been visited by a United States President in office. His place in history will be importantly determined by any palpable advances the errand may produce either toward a durable peace effected without resort to force, or toward a greater unity among the non-Communist nations.”
Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs: “Not for a moment during the earlier years of my administration could such an ambitious trip have been deemed practical. But at the beginning of winter in 1959, with travel by jet becoming commonplace, with the Congress not in session, with the Soviet Premier having just completed a visit to America, and with the world relatively calm, such a journey was clearly feasible.”
Not surprisingly, it was a logistical nightmare. Several airports, such as Kabul, didn’t have adequate weather forecasts to satisfy the flight crew. Others, like Ankara, didn’t have fuel for a Boeing 707. Still others didn’t have reliable, safe food supplies. Ike’s doctors wanted him to drink only bottled water because of his ileitis. By relying on the U.S. military, all the problems were solved, including the stowing of 12 large cases of Mountain Valley water on Air Force One.
Still, there were unforeseen developments. In India, Prime Minister Nehru calmed American security officers when he assured them that the Indian army would keep sacred cows from wandering onto the runway when the president was there. He kept his word.
The 69-year-old Eisenhower returned to Washington, weary but content, just before midnight on December 22.
Ike admitted that there were no “concrete or specific achievements,” but he added: “I had no doubt that the trip was worth the effort it required. By no means does such a conclusion imply that an American President should spend a large portion of his time traveling the earth. But when any future Executive may find the circumstances favorable for undertaking a similar journey, then whatever trouble and inconvenience he might be subjected to in visiting the less well-known parts of the world will be repaid many times over. He will be showered with kindnesses and courtesies to the point of exhaustion, but he will be rewarded richly by the eagerness of whole populations to learn about America, and by his better understanding of the peoples he, directly or indirectly, as head of the strongest nation on earth, is destined to serve.”
Yet it took Eisenhower’s youthful successor, John F. Kennedy, to bring Air Force One and presidential travel fully into the modern age.