The other White House is a Key West getaway
A visit to the Little White House in Key West, Florida, may seem a little like a visit home.
At least it might be if you grew up in the Midwest and spent a lot of time at your grandparents’ house. Especially if your grandparents liked wall-to-wall gray wool carpeting, dark colonialstyle furniture and the odd splash of color from a banana-leaf patterned davenport — or a loud Hawaiian bowling shirt.
“People go through this house today, and it’s an almost universal feeling, like, gee, this reminds me of my grandmother’s house, or this reminds me of the house I grew up in,” the late Miami historian Arva
Moore Parks said in an interview with Florida Humanities in 1993. “This doesn’t look like a president’s house.”
But it was, at least for one president. And, since photos of the interior are still not allowed today for reasons of national security
— in case another president might want to take up residence at The Little White House someday — it could be again.
“The site has served as the functioning White House of President Harry Truman and has documented use by Presidents William Howard Taft, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton,” among others, according to the Key West Harry Truman Foundation.
Truman was certainly here the most — trading the White House in Washington, D.C., for the little one in Key West for 175 days over 11 visits between 1946 and 1952 — and gave it its enduring Midwestern homey style. It remains the only presidential museum in Florida, and possibly the largest collection anywhere of plain and simple Truman-era furnishings (think, Henredon), bottom-shelf bourbon whiskey and one really loud presidential vacation shirt (preserved securely behind soundproof glass).
“Somebody said they were surprised how simple (the house) was,” Truman’s grandson, Clifton Truman Daniel, said in a 2016 interview on Key West with Jenna Stauffer. “It’s a nice house, it’s well kept, but it’s not fancy. And I think that was my grandfather. He liked things plain and simple.”
Our 33rd president came here after catching a cold one dreary Washington week in the second year of his presidency in 1946. His doctor suggested he take a vacation to some warm and secure place, and Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz said the commandant’s quarters at the Key West Submarine Base just happened to be available.
“He still had the cold when he got here,” Clifton Truman Daniel said. “[But] he woke up the first morning, and it was gone.” So began a regular series of working vacations here throughout Truman’s presidency, with some security upgrades and renovations to the 1890-vintage structure after his reelection in 1948.
“He liked the weather, he liked the people (in Key West); he liked the relaxed atmosphere,” Clifton Truman Daniel said. “He brought his staff with him, he brought reporters with him, they wore Hawaiian shirts, they played poker. It was a good rest for him.”
Thirty-minute tours of the two-story, 8,700square-foot house today begin on “the south porch,” one of the upgrades added in 1949.
“You can probably see why he liked this room,” guide J.P. Bacle said, gathering a recent group of masked and social-distanced visitors around a poker table and nearby bar on the first stop of the tour. “I think it’s pretty selfexplanatory.
“The poker table is made of four layers of solid Key West mahogany,” he said. “It has built-in chip holders, and recycled 3-inch brass shell casings for the ashtrays.”
The Trumans – Harry, first lady Bess and their daughter Margaret – were not smokers, he noted. But, in the ‘40s and ‘50s, everybody else was.
“Smoking indoors back then was all fine and good, nobody cared about that,” Bacle said. “What people did care about was gambling.”
The nightly poker games Truman convened with staff, reporters and Key West locals were hardly for high stakes – often just pennies a hand – but, “back in those days, gambling was a sin and also illegal in the state of Florida,” Bacle said. “So when they got finished playing every night, they placed this big round cover on top of the table, so no one else in America would find out what was going on.”
“Simpler times,” Bacle said, smiling. “Scandals have gotten a little better today.”
Moving on from Truman’s favorite room, the tour wound through the first floor, past a photo of the USS Williamsburg, which doubled as a communication and support vessel for the president’s staff of 60 in Key West, and into the dining room, glistening with sterling silver service.
“It’s called the Admiral’s silver, and it was here before Truman came,” Bacle said. “Now Truman, he was a farm boy from Missouri, and all that silver was a little too much for him. So he took it outside for cookouts, for hamburgers and hot dogs.”
The tour moved upstairs along wraparound porches to the first lady’s bedroom and the president’s bedroom and private desk. “There was one bed for
Bess Truman, one bed for her daughter Margaret Truman (in the first lady’s bedroom),” Bacle said. “Now the reason the first couple had different bedrooms was because that’s the way it was back then. Just in case someone had to wake up the president in the middle of the night, the first lady would not be disturbed.
“Well, in 1974, (first lady) Betty Ford moves in, and said ‘this is the dumbest idea ever,’” Bacle said. “So now the first couple, they can do whatever they want.”
The tour returned to the first floor down a narrow stairwell papered with Little White House wallpaper – featuring silhouettes of Dolly and James Madison (“It can be yours for about 400 bucks a roll,” Bacle said) – before reaching the living room, the biggest room in the house. Sights along the way included a Hallet, Davis & Co. upright piano “Played by President Harry S. Truman while residing in Key West,” a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune with the correction of all corrections “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline, a briefcase containing Truman’s cherished collection of classical records, his hat and cane (which he carried stylishly, Bacle said, not because he needed one) and the aforementioned loud shirt behind glass in a closet.
“When he was in Key West, he liked to dress down and he would call a shirt like that his ‘Key West uniform,’” Bacle said. “And, if you could read the Mayan calendar, you could make sense of whatever is (printed) on that shirt.”
If it seems Truman was coming down to Key West generally to relax, go out on Key lime pie crawls, throw loud shirt contests and play poker late into the night, well, yeah, that about covers it, Bacle confirmed. But the president also did some serious work here, once estimating he signed his name between 200 and 600 times a day. (Including, according to a marker in the front lawn, on a Civil Rights Executive Order requiring federal contractors to hire minorities, signed on Dec. 5, 1951.)
“I’m sure you all recognize the sign here [on his desk], ‘the Buck Stops Here,’” Bacle said. “Well, Harry Truman, he was not one for passing the buck. He was a president. He was a commander in chief. The buck stopped with him.”
For more information, call 305-671-9199 or visit trumanlittlewhitehouse.com.