“Truman’s current standing as an up-by-the-bootstraps American whose fortuitous elevation to the presidency and ultimate good sense and honesty in leading the nation through perilous times are a demonstration of how circumstances and human decency can ultimately produce a successful life—and a presidency that resonates as a model of how someone can acquit himself in the highest office.” –Robert Dallek, p. 152-53.
So I had some trouble with my search for the perfect Harry Truman bio. At first I wanted to read the book that David McCullough wrote but the dang thing was 1000 pages!! One. Thousand. Pages. That’s right. Now usually, 1000 pages is a perfect book size for me but after reading 700 pages of FDR and knowing that I have another 500 of Ike later…well it made me rather wary of reading another 1000. Come on, I’m not that fast a reader and I don’t like to brag, but I’m pretty fast as it is. He he.
I went online, did some research on Amazon, and decided upon Margaret Truman’s biography about her father. I had some qualms about reading something about Truman through the eyes of his daughter but this book got such great reviews that I went ahead and ordered it through the library anyways. However, this is where I hit another snag—this book was popular! All copies were in use and there was nothing I could do about it. It wasn’t at the other library system so that didn’t help me and I was damned if I bought this book. (Even though Truman is my mom’s favorite president, I wasn’t at all sure that I would like him.) In the end, I chose to play it safe by defaulting back the American Presidents Series with Harry S Truman: American Presidents Series by Robert Dallek (Times Books: New York, 2008).
Harry Truman was born in Missouri on May 8, 1884 and by 1890, the Trumans had moved to Independence, MO where they would stay for the remainder. Harry attended local public schools and graduated high school in 1901. Instead of pursuing higher education, as he wished, his father’s bankruptcy changed his plans and he had to take jobs to help provide for the family. He worked at the Santa Fe railroad as a payroll clerk and as a bank clerk in Kansas City but his interest in politics was already beginning. In 1900, he attended the Democratic National Convention held in St. Louis.
Starting in 1906, Harry moved back home to help his father with the family farm and there he stayed until WWI hit. With the advent of war, Truman joined the National Guard in 1917 as a first lieutenant and then as a captain. He was sent to France and there distinguished himself. He left the army in May, 1919 and by June he was married to Bess Wallace.
While working in his own haberdashery business, Truman began to lean more towards a life in politics. It was good that he did so because the 1920 post-war recession put him right out of business. Truman decided to tie himself to the local political machine, run by Tom Pendergast, and so doing, he joined as many local ‘clubs’ as he could to give himself a name. “Like President Warren G Harding, who had begun his career in Ohio as a ‘joiner’ of numerous fraternal organizations, Truman became an active member of several civic, service and veterans’ associations, including the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He saw his participation in these groups as essential for business success and as a means to win support from influential leaders for his candidacy” (p. 5).
In 1922, he won his first election for the eastern district judgeship of Jackson County but lost re-election two years later. With no political offices on the horizon, Truman’s next job was selling memberships in the Kansas City Auto Club. With Truman’s first election, he had shown strict party loyalty to Tom Pendergast and the local Democratic Party. This stood him in good stead for in 1926, Truman was elected as a presiding US judge of Jackson County and he would hold this post for another 8 years. “Although he had numerous second thoughts about staying on the job and suffered hidden emotional strains over having to deal with the corruption that was a fixture of Kansas City politics, he rationalized his continuing presence as presiding judge by devoting himself to the effective deliverance of public services: good roads, well-regarded public schools, a county hospital providing up-to-date medical care, humane treatment of indigents, and proper law enforcement by the police and the courts—all provided without budgetary overruns requiring higher taxes” (p. 7).
1934 was the year of his first major election campaign when he won a seat to the US Senate for Missouri and even won reelection in 1940. His first term was characterized by mainly being silent and observing, like all good junior senators, but by his second term, he chaired the Military Affairs Subcommittee hearings and he even put together his own Truman Committee to probe corruption and waste in the military sector of the US Government. For the first time, Truman was operating on the national stage.
As the election of 1944 approached, the Democratic Party had its presidential candidate all ready—Franklin D Roosevelt. Even though this was FDR’s fourth term, the Democrats were confident in his margin of success in the coming election. The problem was the vice presidential position. Current vice president, Wallace, was unacceptable (FDR was sick and nobody wanted Wallace waltzing into the presidency) and the only one that all Democrat leaders, including the president, agreed upon was Harry Truman. “He [Truman] was a solid New Deal supporter from a border state with ties to conservatives and liberals. His reputation for honesty and patriotism were unimpeachable” (p. 15-16). He was easily nominated and was primed to assume the vice presidency after FDR won the election.
What he had not fully expected was that merely six months into his job, he would be promoted, by default, to the highest position in the land. Although FDR was not expected to live out the fourth term, it was still rather a surprise when he died on April 12, 1945 thus making Harry Truman the 33rd President of the United States. Dalleck, the author, gives us a great anecdote about a conversation between Truman and ER. “Ushered up to the president’s quarters, Truman found himself in a room with the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. She delivered the news: ‘Harry, the president is dead.’ When he found his voice, a stunned Truman asked, ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ Mrs. Roosevelt replied, ‘Is there anything we can do for you, Harry? For you are the one in trouble now’” (p. 17).
“A vice president with no national executive experience was now to replace the longest-serving and most revered president since Lincoln, in midst of a world war” (p. 18). You can see why ER regarded Truman with pity. Truman, though, took the bit by the horns and told the American public that he would follow all of FDR’s wartime policies. The problem was that FDR demanded an unconditional surrender from Japan but Truman did not want to waste more American lives on accomplishing this goal. “Nothing weighed on Truman more heavily than the losses that American troops would suffer in an invasion of Japan’s home islands” (p. 26). In July 1945, Truman attended the Potsdam Conference with Joseph Stalin and Clement Atlee, the new prime minister of Great Britain, to discuss the continuing war with Japan. Stalin agreed to enter the Pacific war in three months time if it was still ongoing.
It was around this time that Truman heard about the Manhattan Project and the bomb testing that had been undertaken. Since the project started under Roosevelt and Truman had agreed to follow his policies there was really nothing else but to use the bomb. “He would have been seen as abandoning Roosevelt’s agenda and giving in to sentimental concerns about saving the lives of Japanese civilians at a cost in American lives” (p. 27). Therefore, on August 6, the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima and three days later, on Nagasaki. By August 14, peace had been declared (V-J Day).
1946 was not a good year for Truman. After the blissful end to an atrocious war, foreign and domestic affairs spiraled out of control for the nascent American president. A slow breakdown in US-Soviet relations started with events in Korea, plus a civil war in China pitting the Communists, led by Mao, against the equally awful Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. He had problems with demobilization, inflation, the new Iron Curtain, and labor (there were coal and steel strikes). “It was not Truman’s affinity for the center that made him so vulnerable to criticism but his tendency to compound his problems by being less than astute, at times, in anticipating public antagonism to some of his actions” (p.36).
He came down hard on the strikers (mainly due to the fact that the nation had to have coal and steel for weapons production) and even got involved in the growing red scare by creating the Temporary Committee on Employee Loyalty. On the international front, Truman had problems with Great Britain pulling out of Greece and Turkey. Thus, he issued the Truman Doctrine. “Totalitarian regimes imposed upon free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” (p. 59). Consequently setting the US on a course that would guide its policies for the next 50 years.
In an effort to keep European countries from falling to communism, Marshall as Secretary of State implemented his famous plan. “The State Department decided against proposing outright financial grants, structuring instead a European-wide cooperative effort to use American funds to repair national economies” (p. 60). Things were looking up for Truman and he used his gains overseas to propel him into the spotlight for the election of 1948. In the pre-election polls, Republican Thomas Dewey consistently beat Truman but there was fight in Truman yet. “And of no small consequence, Truman came across to most Americans as a man who didn’t need to be president to feel good about himself. He was like most of them—plainspoken, hardworking, flawed, decent, and honest. It was a rare combination in politics, one that Dewey could not match” (p. 82). In the end, Truman won by the skin of his teeth.
Beginning in 1948 and lasting well into 1949 was the ‘Berlin Crisis,’ the Soviet Union blockading the Allies’ portion of Berlin. Instead of getting aggressive, Truman merely had supplies airlifted into the beleaguered section and rode out the crisis. “His resolve in the face of the Soviet threat boosted his public standing in the United States and encouraged European allies to believe that Washington would not abandon them to Moscow’s bullying” (p. 76). Then in April 1949, NATO was created with the corresponding Warsaw Pact signed in retaliation. The growing problems in Korea sparked the arms race between the two sides of the Cold War and it would get worse.
Poor Harry. Events were slowly getting out of control. In 1950, the Communists won the war in China and forced the Nationalists onto Taiwan. Truman was sure that Mao would invade the island but he never did the US was then in a position to do nothing at all. “But when no invasion occurred, it left Chiang as a continuing presence in the US domestic dispute over China policy and froze the United States into a position of long-term antagonism to Communist China, which the Chinese were only too happy to reciprocate” (p. 97). Truman’s lack of action here reflected quite badly on him. Not to mention, there was still a war in Korea. North Korea had started it all by invading on June 25, 1950 but General MacArthur arrived and turned the tables. The US and South Koreans push the North Koreans back to the original boundary line but Truman allowed MacArthur to then invade North Korea. It was a mess that eventually brought the Chinese into the war, along with the Russians.
Domestically things were even worse for Truman at this time. Alger Hiss, a good friend of Truman’s and a government employee, was convicted of perjury. Truman was accused of cronyism. Senator Joseph McCarthy was on his meteoric rise and his accusations were fueling the rising anticommunistic trend in the United States. And then Truman stuck his foot in it—he fired the great General MacArthur. Not only had MacArthur been in the US Army (as had his father) for ages but he was an American icon. The problem started when MacArthur had promised total victory in Korea if allowed to invade (which Truman had gone along with) but the stakes kept getting higher and there had been no clean victory. Instead, MacArthur asked for increasing numbers of bombs, men, arms, etc with no end to the war in sight. Plus he, unwisely, decided to badmouth the administration to the press. “Truman justified his removal of MacArthur on three grounds: (a) the general had defied presidential directives to submit public statements for clearance before issuing them; (b) he had publicly disputed the president’s foreign policy positions, undermining confidence in the president’s foreign policy with allies and adversaries; and (c) he had recklessly tried to turn the limited war in Korea into a full-scale conflict with the Chinese, risking a response from the Soviet Union that could have precipitated World War III” (p. 119). Despite all these really good reasons, people were just plain mad at Truman’s seemingly un-American decision to relieve MacArthur. With MacArthur out of the picture, though, peace talks at Panmunjom began in June 1951.
In 1952, Truman decided not to run for president in the coming election. He was having problems with his Attorney General and he was not doing well physically. “He was so pale, strained, and tired that they feared he was on the verge of a collapse” (p. 136). He agreed to bombings in Korea and when another steel strike threatened, Truman seized the mills. This was a mistake. “It proved to be one of the greatest blunders of his presidency. Truman was vilified in the media and in the Congress as a Hitler, a Mussolini, a president who had abused his constitutional powers and should be impeached for trying to set up a dictatorship” (p. 136).
In the end, the election of 1952 was a huge Republican victory. “It was a shattering end to the Truman presidency” (p. 144). In retirement, the Trumans returned to Independence, MO and remained staunch Democrats. In fact, Truman even helped actively campaign in the subsequent 1956 and 1960 elections. He received a presidential pension and that along with the sale of his farm and his memoirs provided a very comfortable existence for him. He spent most of his time creating a presidential library and museum which opened in 1957. During his lifetime, he was honored by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. “Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society gave life to a number of reforms Truman had tried to enact as part of his Fair Deal, vindicating Truman’s judgment on what the country needed to improve the lives of most Americans” (p. 152). He died on December 26, 1972 of pneumonia and organ failure.
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