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I recently finished David McCullough's biography Truman. Many of you will remember McCullough as the fatherly narrator of Ken Burns' The Civil War series, and his contributions to many other PBS documentaries. Truman is truly a massive book, nearly 1000 over-sized pages of main text. But McCullough's style is interesting and easy to read. Perhaps there are too many details in the book for the casual reader, but it is entertaining and worth the effort.
Harry Truman was President of the United States when I was born and I was still quite young when he left office, so obviously I wouldn't have a lot of direct memories of him being President. In fact I don't have any. I have memories of things that happened when he was President, even political events. But none of Truman being President. I remember General MacArthur making his famous speech to Congress when Truman fired him. I saw "...Old soldiers never die. They just fade away..." live on TV. I remember bits of the Republican National Convention when Eisenhower was nominated to succeed Truman, and that Eisenhower's Republican challenger was Robert Taft of Ohio.
I don't remember Truman being President, but I knew that he was, and I knew the names of many of the people in his administration which must have come up over and over during the evening news. So reading the book was like filling in yawning gaps of history during my childhood.
Truman's Presidency was in many ways a contradiction. Many people thought he should have never been President. Yet in 1944 the Democratic party was well aware that F. D. R was not likely to live through another term, and they rejected the then sitting Vice-President Henry Wallace for another term and then purposely chose Truman to be Roosevelt's likely successor. On the surface Harry Truman was unpopular as a President can get. Yet he had no problem getting elected to a second term in his own right. The people behind the press, thought Harry Truman was a bumpkin, who was argumentative, unlikable and generally unfit to be President. But the reporters who actually covered the White House thought he was rather intelligent and very likable.
Someone once commented that Truman made all the correct big decisions and all the wrong little ones. Truman was President at perhaps the most crucial period of the 20th century. It was his decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, to develop the hydrogen bomb, to draw the line against Soviet expansion in Europe, and to make use of a lapse in Soviet diplomatic wisdom to make the North Korean invasion of South Korea a war technically against the bulk of the United Nations. While the war ended in a bloody stalemate, it did give the UN teeth which the League of Nations never came close to having, leading to UN 'peace keeping' intervention in conflicts ever since. It was his decision to give massive foreign aid to Europe starting with Greece which then was in economic chaos. The fact that the US is leaving Europe to work out its own solution to the current Greek financial crisis, begins to show how much things have changed for the better in the world since the middle of the last century.
Truman was known as an honest, forthright man. Yet there is no question he would never have won any political office had he not been a part of what was a very crooked political machine in Kansas City. Truman was loyal to a fault and never disavowed his Kansas City machine friends even when he had risen far above them.
Truman came from a family that had Confederate sympathies and a region of western Missouri that produced most of the infamous guerrilla raiders that terrorized Kansas and the rest of Missouri before and during the Civil War, some of whom, like Jesse James and Cole Younger, became the nation's most notorious outlaws after the war. His mother despised Abraham Lincoln. He came to be a vocal advocate of civil rights, notably starting the desegregation of the armed forces. Yet in his private life he rarely referred to any African-American as anything but the n-word.
Once a reporter tried hard to get Truman to talk about his father being a failure. Not only did the father have constant business troubles, he gambled so heavily and unsuccessfully in grain futures that the family remained in debt long after the father died. Harry snapped back at the reporter, "How could he be a failure if his son became President of the United States?" Harry himself was no big success before going into politics, often referred to as 'that failed haberdasher.'
Truman made the political mistake of saying he personally liked Stalin. In fact Truman liked just about everybody, except those he felt had crossed him personally. But over time he almost always relented and made up with everyone he had problems with. He notoriously hated Ike Eisenhower. They had worked together closely after the war, and Truman had bluntly offered to step aside and not run for election in 1948, if Eisenhower would agree to run as the Democratic candidate. Again in 1952 when Truman was planning retire, he tried to convince Eisenhower to run as a Democrat. Finally when probably the bazillionth reporter asked Eisenhower if he was going to accept the Democratic nomination, Ike replied, "What makes you think I'm a Democrat?" adding that his family had always been Republicans. Truman campaigned against Eisenhower and probably said some things which Eisenhower took personally. Eisenhower in turn, was pointedly rude to Truman leading up to and during the inauguration. It would not be until John Kennedy's funeral that the two began to mend their fences.
Reporters liked Truman both because he took interest in them as people, and because he would either say "no comment" or give straight answers to their questions. F. D. Roosevelt tended to not pay any attention to people as individuals when they weren't from his high social class, and fended off unwanted questions with what was sometimes flippant humor. Eisenhower having been a commanding general was also a tad aloof, and besides not being a terrific public speaker, he would purposely answer pesky questions in such a round about manner that, while he may have actually said something important about some topic, he didn't come close to answering the question. This maddened many reporters who took his cleverness for clouded thinking.
Truman blundered in appointing several wrong people to assist him. Virtually every President has a few particularly bone-head political appointments on his record, witness George H. Bush and "You're doing a great job here, Browny." For some Presidents like U. S. Grant, Warren Harding, and Richard Nixon the bad behavior of poor appointees came back to overshadow everything else they did. Truman was not quite to the extreme of those three, but his loyalty to his old friends included appointing an alcoholic buddy from his old World War I army unit to be his personal military adviser, and a thug from the KC political machine to be his personal assistant. His bad appointments should not be thought to include the many people who the infamous "Tail Gunner" Joe McCarthy slandered in those years.
I don't remember hearing much good about Harry S. Truman when I was a child. My father probably voted for him, but wasn't a fan. My much older brother-in-law who grew up in Truman's hometown, Independence, Missouri, always distorted the name so that it sounded like Harry Ass Truman. But my brother-in-law was a school teacher and felt the need to acquaint kids he came in contact with, with the facts, whether he liked the facts or not. I was about 13 when he took me to Harry Truman's Presidential Library. I was allowed to make my own judgements about what I saw there. On the way to the library, he pointed to a big, very dour looking house behind a matching dour fence and said, "That's Mrs. Truman's house." At the time, I did notice that he didn't say Mr. or President Truman's house, but didn't catch the implied slur that it belonged to his wife's family, not to Harry. I did learn from the biography, given his predictable schedule, that Harry Truman was most likely in his office at the library the day we visited. My brother-in-law, my sister and I visited Eisenhower's library in Abilene, Kansas about a week later. Eisenhower was most definitely *not* there that day. ;o)
Harry Truman was President of the United States when I was born and I was still quite young when he left office, so obviously I wouldn't have a lot of direct memories of him being President. In fact I don't have any. I have memories of things that happened when he was President, even political events. But none of Truman being President. I remember General MacArthur making his famous speech to Congress when Truman fired him. I saw "...Old soldiers never die. They just fade away..." live on TV. I remember bits of the Republican National Convention when Eisenhower was nominated to succeed Truman, and that Eisenhower's Republican challenger was Robert Taft of Ohio.
I don't remember Truman being President, but I knew that he was, and I knew the names of many of the people in his administration which must have come up over and over during the evening news. So reading the book was like filling in yawning gaps of history during my childhood.
Truman's Presidency was in many ways a contradiction. Many people thought he should have never been President. Yet in 1944 the Democratic party was well aware that F. D. R was not likely to live through another term, and they rejected the then sitting Vice-President Henry Wallace for another term and then purposely chose Truman to be Roosevelt's likely successor. On the surface Harry Truman was unpopular as a President can get. Yet he had no problem getting elected to a second term in his own right. The people behind the press, thought Harry Truman was a bumpkin, who was argumentative, unlikable and generally unfit to be President. But the reporters who actually covered the White House thought he was rather intelligent and very likable.
Someone once commented that Truman made all the correct big decisions and all the wrong little ones. Truman was President at perhaps the most crucial period of the 20th century. It was his decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, to develop the hydrogen bomb, to draw the line against Soviet expansion in Europe, and to make use of a lapse in Soviet diplomatic wisdom to make the North Korean invasion of South Korea a war technically against the bulk of the United Nations. While the war ended in a bloody stalemate, it did give the UN teeth which the League of Nations never came close to having, leading to UN 'peace keeping' intervention in conflicts ever since. It was his decision to give massive foreign aid to Europe starting with Greece which then was in economic chaos. The fact that the US is leaving Europe to work out its own solution to the current Greek financial crisis, begins to show how much things have changed for the better in the world since the middle of the last century.
Truman was known as an honest, forthright man. Yet there is no question he would never have won any political office had he not been a part of what was a very crooked political machine in Kansas City. Truman was loyal to a fault and never disavowed his Kansas City machine friends even when he had risen far above them.
Truman came from a family that had Confederate sympathies and a region of western Missouri that produced most of the infamous guerrilla raiders that terrorized Kansas and the rest of Missouri before and during the Civil War, some of whom, like Jesse James and Cole Younger, became the nation's most notorious outlaws after the war. His mother despised Abraham Lincoln. He came to be a vocal advocate of civil rights, notably starting the desegregation of the armed forces. Yet in his private life he rarely referred to any African-American as anything but the n-word.
Once a reporter tried hard to get Truman to talk about his father being a failure. Not only did the father have constant business troubles, he gambled so heavily and unsuccessfully in grain futures that the family remained in debt long after the father died. Harry snapped back at the reporter, "How could he be a failure if his son became President of the United States?" Harry himself was no big success before going into politics, often referred to as 'that failed haberdasher.'
Truman made the political mistake of saying he personally liked Stalin. In fact Truman liked just about everybody, except those he felt had crossed him personally. But over time he almost always relented and made up with everyone he had problems with. He notoriously hated Ike Eisenhower. They had worked together closely after the war, and Truman had bluntly offered to step aside and not run for election in 1948, if Eisenhower would agree to run as the Democratic candidate. Again in 1952 when Truman was planning retire, he tried to convince Eisenhower to run as a Democrat. Finally when probably the bazillionth reporter asked Eisenhower if he was going to accept the Democratic nomination, Ike replied, "What makes you think I'm a Democrat?" adding that his family had always been Republicans. Truman campaigned against Eisenhower and probably said some things which Eisenhower took personally. Eisenhower in turn, was pointedly rude to Truman leading up to and during the inauguration. It would not be until John Kennedy's funeral that the two began to mend their fences.
Reporters liked Truman both because he took interest in them as people, and because he would either say "no comment" or give straight answers to their questions. F. D. Roosevelt tended to not pay any attention to people as individuals when they weren't from his high social class, and fended off unwanted questions with what was sometimes flippant humor. Eisenhower having been a commanding general was also a tad aloof, and besides not being a terrific public speaker, he would purposely answer pesky questions in such a round about manner that, while he may have actually said something important about some topic, he didn't come close to answering the question. This maddened many reporters who took his cleverness for clouded thinking.
Truman blundered in appointing several wrong people to assist him. Virtually every President has a few particularly bone-head political appointments on his record, witness George H. Bush and "You're doing a great job here, Browny." For some Presidents like U. S. Grant, Warren Harding, and Richard Nixon the bad behavior of poor appointees came back to overshadow everything else they did. Truman was not quite to the extreme of those three, but his loyalty to his old friends included appointing an alcoholic buddy from his old World War I army unit to be his personal military adviser, and a thug from the KC political machine to be his personal assistant. His bad appointments should not be thought to include the many people who the infamous "Tail Gunner" Joe McCarthy slandered in those years.
I don't remember hearing much good about Harry S. Truman when I was a child. My father probably voted for him, but wasn't a fan. My much older brother-in-law who grew up in Truman's hometown, Independence, Missouri, always distorted the name so that it sounded like Harry Ass Truman. But my brother-in-law was a school teacher and felt the need to acquaint kids he came in contact with, with the facts, whether he liked the facts or not. I was about 13 when he took me to Harry Truman's Presidential Library. I was allowed to make my own judgements about what I saw there. On the way to the library, he pointed to a big, very dour looking house behind a matching dour fence and said, "That's Mrs. Truman's house." At the time, I did notice that he didn't say Mr. or President Truman's house, but didn't catch the implied slur that it belonged to his wife's family, not to Harry. I did learn from the biography, given his predictable schedule, that Harry Truman was most likely in his office at the library the day we visited. My brother-in-law, my sister and I visited Eisenhower's library in Abilene, Kansas about a week later. Eisenhower was most definitely *not* there that day. ;o)