Truman

by David McCullough

The feeling in surviving accounts is of noisy good company and wild scenery and of “history” as an immediate and entirely human experience.

Politics sure is the ruination of many a good man. Between hot air and graft he usually loses not only his head but his money and friends as well. Still, if I were real rich I’d just as soon spend my money buying votes and offices as yachts and autos. Success seems to me to be merely a point of view anyway. Some men have an idea that if they corner all the loose change they are self-made successful men. Makes no difference to them if they do eat beans off a knife or not know whether Napoleon was a man or a piece of silver. Some others have a notion that if they can get high offices and hold up themselves as models of virtue to a gaping public in long-winded, high-sounding speeches that they have reached the highest pinnacle of success. It seems to me that the ability to hand out self-praise makes most men successes in their own minds anyway. Some of the world’s greatest failures are really greater than some of the other kind. To succeed financially a man can’t have any heart. To succeed politically he must be an egoist or a fool or a ward boss tool. To my notion, an ideal condition would be to have to work just enough so if you stopped you’d not go busted at once—but still you’d know if you didn’t work you couldn’t live. And then have your home and friends and pleasures regulated to your income, say a thousand a month. I am sure I’d be satisfied then to let vile ambition, political or monetary, starve at the gate.

I could die happy doing something for you. (Just imagine a guy with spectacles and a girl mouth doing the Sir Lancelot.) Since I can’t rescue you from any monster or carry you from a burning building or save you from a sinking ship—simply because I’d be afraid of the monsters, couldn’t carry you, and can’t swim—I’ll have to go to work and make money enough to pay my debts and then get you to take me for what I am:

In his own state in 1935, nine out of ten farms had no electricity.

“The responsibility of a great state is to serve and not to dominate the world.”

Truman said simply, “Brave men don’t belong to any one country. I respect bravery wherever I see it.”

“An economist,” he told them, “is a man who wears a watch chain with a Phi Beta Kappa key at one end and no watch at the other.”

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

Now, if ever, our vocal cords ought to be played on the keyboard of our minds.