Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography

by William Zinsser

So it stands to reason that if you want to understand Harry Truman you’d better know a good deal about Jackson County, Missouri, and you’d better know a good deal about the people there who mattered to him, not just when he was growing up, but during his whole life.

I think his Presidency marks the dividing line between our time and another time that was very different. There isn’t a day goes by that some headline in the papers doesn’t relate back to the Truman administration. Consider that Harry Truman was not just the only President who has used an atomic weapon - he was the President who started the CIA, who started the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who started the National Security Council, who set in motion much of the progress we’ve seen in civil rights. He recognized the new state of Israel. He launched the Marshall Plan, and with his Point Four Program and Truman Doctrine set in motion as national policy certain obligations which, many contend, saved western civilization - or, some would also argue, led to Vietnam.

But Harry Truman was a much more complicated and interesting person than most of us have been led to believe.

He lived almost ninety years. But at heart, he remained a nineteenth-century man. He is from nineteenth-century America. He was never really happy with our twentieth century.

He believed in the old notion of nineteenth-century progress. Tomorrow is going to be better than today. We’ll make it better. He also confounds some of our standard notions about certain past decades.

Harry Truman is the last President we will ever have whose background and roots come right out of the American frontier, or what we associate with the American frontier. And to understand the ideology that was so much a part of his character, the point of view, the sense of right and wrong, the sense of how you conduct yourself, you have to understand western Missouri in the nineteenth century, when western Missouri was America’s westernmost frontier.

I don’t think there’s any question that the night Harry Truman came back from Washington after Eisenhower had been inaugurated, and there were 10,000 people at the station to greet him, was the greatest moment in his life.

And one of the things I’m discovering - and here is where you feel the excitement of this work - is the person who existed before he was put in the limelight. And in that person, you start to see identifiable marks.

Today many of the ideas a man like Truman held to don’t seem very smart. And certainly they’re not fashionable. But they were solid. And irrefutable. Honor your father and mother.

And when you realize that Truman’s people were slaveholders, and that he grew up in a town where the newspaper offered such advice to good citizens, you realize how much more there has to be to the story of his stand on civil rights in 1948. He was the first President since Lincoln, the first President in our century, to make civil rights and racial equality a policy.

I like the autobiographical writings of people that are written before they become celebrated. Because afterward, you can’t help but be a little suspicious.

Each felt he could tell what the ordinary person thought and felt because he understood the ordinary person; he didn’t need to take polls. Actually, I think Truman really did understand, because he was one himself.

Certainly one of the most important things you must do if you’re writing a biography of Harry Truman is to understand Franklin Roosevelt, to see the act that Truman follows. William Luchtenberg’s marvelous book, In the Shadow of FDR, makes the case that virtually all our Presidents have remained in the shadow of FDR, but nobody was in the shadow more than Harry Truman, and to come out of the shadow was a great necessity for him. He never expressed his dissatisfaction with Roosevelt publicly - you have to read between the lines to see that it’s there - and he wouldn’t have expressed it, because Roosevelt was his commander in chief, Roosevelt was the leader of the party, Roosevelt was the President.

After the war, journalists in Washington made up a list of the ten men in civilian life who had done the most for the war effort, and Harry Truman was the only member of either house in the legislature who was on the list. He was a highly effective senator in that term because Pendergast was gone by then.

Truman was the last President who knew everything that was going on that had to do with the executive office. He presented his own budget and had a press conference in which he was grilled on the budget. No President could do that today. He was largely what he appeared, and I think that’s one of the reasons people are so charmed by him now.

Lee writes: “You must be frank with the world. Frankness is the child of honesty and courage.” (Very interesting idea.) “Just say what you mean to do on every occasion, and take it for granted you mean to do right. If a friend asks you a favor, you should grant it, if it is reasonable. If not, tell him plainly why you cannot. You will wrong him and wrong yourself by equivocation of any kind. Never do a wrong thing to make a friend or keep one.” And this is the great line: “Above all, do not appear to others what you are not.”

She was a people person. Never mind that poem about selecting her own society and shutting the valves of her attention like a stone; her life revolved around people.

What bothers me is the confidence with which many of them pronounce the search to be over: She was this or that

“So she’s still a mystery, isn’t she?” “Yes,” she answered (and I’ll let Mrs. Ward have the last word), “and I hope she always will be.”

The word helpmate intrigued Louisa, who, when she was still in the White House, wrote: “Man’s interpretation of the word ‘helpmate’ as used in the Bible means this: Women made to cook his dinner, wash his clothes, gratify his sensual appetites, and thank him and love him for permission to drudge through life at the mercy of his caprices. Is this the interpretation intended by the Creator, the father of all mercy?” A deeply religious person herself, she often thought about the prevailing notion that heaped guilt and inferiority only on women because of Eve and the apple.

.logosnotes

I want to recapture some lives and outlooks of American women during the nineteenth century, when the place of the female in society changed significantly, amid much controversy.

Rarely were there more talented people in the White House - male or female.

I feel strongly that in biography, the author, like a painter, should lead the reader or viewer into a life, and at certain points leave the reader to reflect about what the story means.