Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Her grandfather guarded Truman
Guarding Truman
Edward Egan, the grandfather of novelist Jennifer Egan, was a Chicago cop, and he and his partner served as Truman's bodyguards on the senator's visits to the city. The three of them got along so well that the arrangement continued after Truman became president.
Letters and Photographs
Egan kept lots of letters from Truman thanking him for his good work. In some photographs the three of them laugh together. In many more, Truman is somewhere in the frame and only the corner of Egan's head shows, because he is scoping out what's going on.
A Real Cop
He was a real cop. His son once stood with him outside the courthouse in Chicago while Egan gave a steely look to everything around him. When the son asked what he was looking at, Egan said he was just trying to separate the good guys from the bad guys.
How did a senator become president so fast?
Truman's rise ran through Chicago. At the 1944 Democratic National Convention there, he was chosen as Franklin Roosevelt's running mate in place of Vice President Henry Wallace. Truman had become nationally known as chairman of a Senate committee investigating waste in wartime defense contracts. He took office as president on April 12, 1945, when Roosevelt died less than three months into a fourth term.
How did protecting presidents become the Secret Service's job?
The Secret Service was created in 1865 as part of the Treasury Department to fight counterfeiting. After the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, Congress pressed it to protect the president full time, and Congress formally funded that work in 1906. Truman himself was the target of an armed attack at Blair House in 1950 by two Puerto Rican nationalists, in which White House police officer Leslie Coffelt was killed.
More from Better in Person with Stephen Dubner
