Despite Truman’s reputation for plainspokenness and modesty—a reputation, incidentally, far more firmly affixed today than when he was alive—he was actually a complicated man. Possessed of the provincial’s acute sensitivity to perceived condescension, he had a reflexive disdain for cultural elites—he especially disliked the mostly Ivy League–educated diplomats, the “striped pants boys” he called them, he had inherited from Roosevelt—and this often manifested in obstinacy; in Truman’s world, the more his learned advisors tried to push him in one direction, the more apt he was to do the
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