Truman

by David McCullough

We worship money instead of honor. A billionaire, in our estimation, is much greater in these days in the eyes of the people than the public servant who works for public interest. It makes no difference if the billionaire rode to wealth on the sweat of little children and the blood of underpaid labor. No one ever considered Carnegie libraries steeped in the blood of the Homestead steelworkers, but they are. We do not remember that the Rockefeller Foundation is founded on the dead miners of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company and a dozen other similar performances. We worship Mammon;

If national defense was the issue, the sky was the limit.

His great concern, Marshall said, was that Russia might delay participation in the war against Japan “until we have done all the dirty work.”

“I am anxious to bring home to you that the world is no longer county-size, no longer state-size, no longer nation-size,” he said. “It is a world in which we must all get along.”

Let us not forget that we are fighting for peace, and for the welfare of mankind. We are not fighting for conquest. There is not one piece of territory or one thing of a monetary nature that we want out of this war.

conferring with his pilot,

“They [the Republicans] did not understand the worker, the farmer, the everyday person. . . . Most of them honestly believed that prosperity actually began at the top and would trickle down in due time to benefit all the people.”

“The action of some of our United States Zionists will eventually prejudice everyone against what they are trying to get done. I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath.

Acheson agreed and quoted Euripides: “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”

Less than half an hour later, he was being driven in a closed limousine back from the Capitol toward Georgetown when at 7th and D streets the driver stopped for a red light. It was the first time that a car in which Truman was riding had had to stop for a traffic light since 1945.

Free speech is a restraint on government; not an incitement to the citizen.