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
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