Acheson on Truman (and Lincoln)

WILSON: Well, I think the question that you’ve answered in great part in your book, that I would like to put a little differently. You indicated that you were working for a remarkable man, Harry Truman.

ACHESON: Oh, yes.

WILSON: And I wonder how much again the contrast between the previous man’s administrative efforts had to do with your obvious admiration and ability to work with Truman?

ACHESON: You mean FDR?

WILSON: Yes. It was so much better.

ACHESON: Truman was straight, above board, straight in line.

Two days ago, Monday, former President Sachar of Brandeis University was here and talked about President Truman. He started off by saying, “Let me read you two or three paragraphs here about Mr. Truman, criticize that.”

And I said, “All right.”

And he began about how with totally inadequate preparation, education, and everything else, Mr. Truman was turning out to be one of the best Presidents, and went on and said, “What do you think of this?”

I said, “I think it’s the goddamndest collection of cliches I ever heard in my life, and none of it is true.”

Well, he said, “You agree that he didn’t have any education.”

I said, “I don’t agree to that at all; he had a remarkable education.” My younger daughter had TB at 19, after she had been in college one month, and just been married and her husband went off to the war, and she spent five years in Saranac and lost her lung; and in the course of that time she spent in bed she read and read and read and talked to all kinds of people. And she’s far better educated than I am. I went to the best school, the best college, the best law school. That isn’t the way you get educated. The point is what enters into your innards.

Suppose somebody sits under John Kenneth Galbraith for three years to get an education; a hell of a waste of time. Mr. Truman read every book in the Independence library, which had about 3,500 to 5,000 volumes including three encyclopedias, and he read them all the way through. He took in a hell of a lot more out of that effort, which he took out of farming when he did it, than he would listening to all of this crap that goes on at Yale and Harvard, and perhaps in other places–Harvard Law School education.

I sit here and talk about his preparation. I would think he did more preparation by being on the County Court or whatever it was called in Jackson County, than he would have being a Justice of the Supreme Court, a hell of a lot more. See how people work, how the thing runs, what makes it tick, what are the important things, what are the unimportant things. And it’s sort of significant comparing to other Presidents. Well, I think I said Washington should have been President. Tom Jefferson I would give a very low rating, too; he was a man of words, and was a poor Governor, a poor Ambassador to France. The only thing as President that he really did that was really worth a damn was the Louisiana Purchase. And that was contrary to everything that he was . . .

MCKINZIE: That he believed in, yes.

ACHESON: Well, he said, “What do you think about Lincoln?”

I said, “The best thing that can be said about Lincoln are the Trumanesque qualities that he had.

“He said, “That’s the damndest thing I ever heard, you usually think it’s the other way, the thing that is good about Truman is the Lincolnesque.”

I said, “That isn’t what he had at all; he didn’t have Lincolnesque qualities. Lincoln had Trumanesque qualities. He did things that were contrary to the baloney that he talked; he didn’t believe his own book. A house divided against itself doesn’t fall if you stand up and fight, the house stands up, and he proved it. All these things–it isn’t true that a drop of blood drawn by the lash has got to be paid for by one drawn by the sword, or that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous–poetic talk, that’s fool talk. Dr. Johnson said to Boswell, “You can talk foolishly, but don’t think foolishly.”

from Dean Acheson’s oral history at the Truman Library. I was looking for the source of Truman’s “cry-baby” remark re: Oppenheimer, as dramatized in the popular film. There were only three people at that meeting, so how do we know what happened? How does that story come down to us?