Truman

by David McCullough

“I ate your bouquet. I drank your dishwater. But I’ll be darned if I’ll eat your bug.”

Harry volunteered “with something approaching the speed of light.”

“I’m horribly anxious for you to suffer from an excessively good opinion of me!”

“When a man’s in need,” T.J. would lecture, “we don’t ask whether he’s a Republican or Democrat. . . .

Why, if the President asked Congress to commit suicide tomorrow they’d do it.”

“Potomac Fever,” which he described as a prevalent, ludicrous Washington disease characterized by a swelling of the head to abnormal proportions.

To Hopkins, he advised using either diplomatic language with Stalin or a baseball bat, whichever would work.

Beyond Frankfurt he had an escort of twenty P-47 Thunderbolts.

(Truman would take particular delight in introducing his burly former courthouse custodian to the Russians as Marshal Canfil, a title they took to signify military rank and so showed him utmost deference.)

“a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,”

“we are the first great nation to feed and support the conquered. We are the first great nation to create independent republics from conquered territory, Cuba and the Philippines. Our neighbors are not afraid of us. Their borders have no forts, no soldiers, no tanks, no big guns lined up.” The United States wanted peace in the world and the United States would be prepared “for trouble if it comes.”

After close examination, an engineer told Truman the ceiling in the State Dining Room was staying in place largely from “force of habit.”

was not just American Jews who were stirred by the prospect of a new nation for the Jewish people, it was most of America.

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.

“Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck.” To his sister Mary Jane he wrote, “I’m so tired and bedeviled I can’t be decent to people.”

“You win, you baldheaded son-of-a-bitch. I will see him.”

“You have to know Mr. Dewey well,” she said, “in order to dislike him.”

(On more than one occasion Dewey had been heard to say that the Ohio senator should have carnal relations with himself.)

eventually we will get peace in this world, because that is the only way we can survive with the modern inventions under which we live.

It is the business of government to see that the little fellow gets a square deal. . . .

Truman said Republican talk of unity was all “a lot of hooey—and if that rhymes with anything, it is not my fault.”

charged with the responsibility of protecting the rights of the individual and his freedom in the exercise of those abilities. . . .

(With his father a minister and his mother a distiller’s daughter, he liked to say, he knew both good and evil at an early age.)

We must understand that for a long, long period of time they will continue to believe as they do,

man who, when his horse kicked up and stuck a foot through the stirrup, said to the horse, “If you are going to get on, I will get off.”

They want us to play Russian roulette with the foreign policy of the United States—with all the chambers of the pistol loaded.

“I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he’d taken a poll in Egypt?”

It is remarkable indeed how time flies and makes you an old man whether you want to be or not.

“They gave me about five or ten gallons of antibiotics by sticking needles in veins. But they just couldn’t kill me.”

And what would the President say to the tree, Melton would be asked by a visitor years later. “He would say, ‘You’re doing a good job.’