Truman

by David McCullough

In three months he drove 5,000 miles. Not since his first pair of eyeglasses had anything so changed his life, and again it was Mamma who made it happen.

He missed her terribly.

His letters, however, carried none of the old anguish over what he might make of himself in life. There was no more self-doubt, or self-pity over his supposedly bad Truman luck.

Danford knew what he was talking about (he had helped write the artillery manual), and while an exacting disciplinarian, he knew also to treat those under him with kindness and understanding.

The Battle of the Lys lasted three weeks until the Ludendorff offensive was stopped. Winston Churchill would consider it the critical struggle on the Western Front and, thus, of the war.

“The men think I am not much afraid of shells but they don’t know I was too scared to run and that is pretty scared.”

The battle lasted ten months, the longest ever. Casualties on both sides came to 900,000 men.

“We were just—well, part of it was luck and part of it was good leadership,” said Private Vere Leigh. “Some of the other batteries didn’t have that kind of leadership.”

His outlook, tastes, his habits of thought had been shaped by a different world from the one that followed after 1918.

On May 8, Harry’s birthday and his second day home, he and Bess had their first and apparently their last heated argument.

“Stealing elections had become a high art,” wrote one man, “refined and streamlined by the constant factional battles. . . .” And the prize at stake always was power—jobs, influence, money, “business,”

“Most people were broke and they sympathized with a man in politics who admitted his financial condition.”

many were to say later, that Harry was not always the best judge of character when it came to his friends.

Raised on the idea that appearances mattered, as an expression of self-respect,

every person I’ve ever had any association with since birth has wanted me to take pity on him and furnish him some county money without much return.”

“Three things ruin a man,” Harry would tell a reporter long afterward. “Power, money, and women. “I never wanted power,” he said. “I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now.”

Any man who was dissolute with women, Truman believed, was not a man to be trusted entirely.

“Being too good is apt to be uninteresting,” a line they all loved.

I think no matter what job he held he put all he had into it. He enjoyed it and did the best he knew how. . . .”

Friends don’t count in fair weather. It is when troubles come that friends count.

Invariably courteous, Pendergast would listen attentively, ask a few questions, then scrawl a note on a slip of paper requesting somebody somewhere in one or another city or county organization, or in one of his own enterprises, to consider the needs of the bearer “and oblige,” these final two words seeming to carry the full weight of his command.

Only Harry Truman appeared untroubled by the heat, a peculiarity that would be noticed often in times ahead.

This, Messall decided, was an altogether different kind of man from what he imagined and one he now wanted very much to work for.

He was acutely aware of his limited formal education, and in a determined effort to compensate for it, he never let up.

“I can see no harm in talking to anyone—no matter what his background. In fact I think everyone has a right to be heard if you expect to get all the facts.”

He was heart and soul an Andrew Jackson–William Jennings Bryan–T. J. Pendergast kind of Democrat.

I am hoping to make a reputation as a Senator . . . if I live long enough that’ll make the money success look like cheese. But you’ll have to put up with a lot if I do it because I won’t sell influence and I’m perfectly willing to be cussed if I’m right.

To his surprise and delight, T.J.’s welcome was the warmest ever.

“He was broke when he went to the Senate,” Edgar Hinde would say. “He didn’t have a dime and he had all the opportunity in the world. He could have walked out of that office [as county judge] with a million dollars on that road contract. You know that would have been the easiest thing in the world. He could have gone to one of those contractors and said, ‘I want ten percent.’ Why you know they would have given it to him in a flash. But he came out of there with nothing.”

For all his loyal service to the New Deal, Senator Truman was not someone Roosevelt was willing to stand by or utter a word for.

Hitler boasted that his air Blitz would break the will of the English people.

From his reading of Civil War history he knew what damage could be done to a President by congressional harassment in a time of emergency, and the lives it could cost by prolonging the war.

Roosevelt wanted the power divided. He had no wish to create a so-called “production czar,” which, the committee decided, was exactly what was needed most, a strong man with clear authority.

It has all too often done nothing when it should have realized that problems cannot be avoided by refusing to admit that they exist.”

On December 4, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox declared, “No matter what happens the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping.”

We’re always surprised of course even when the expected happens—if it’s war anyway.

Still he couldn’t sleep, fretting over the course of the war.

he said the war was only a tragic continuation of “the one we fought in 1917 and 1918.” The victors in that war, he argued, “had the opportunity to compel a peace that would protect us from war for many generations. But they missed the opportunity.” A “spirit of isolationism” had brought the worse calamity of the present conflict. It must never happen again.

Yet he acquired no airs, for all this. He was as unpresuming, as accessible as always, despite the extraordinary new power he had and the urgent, wartime atmosphere of Washington. Self-importance was on display in the city in many quarters to a greater degree than ever in memory, but Truman seemed somehow unaffected.

“The man from Missouri,” remembered Claude Pepper, “had dared to say ‘show me’ to the powerful military-industrial complex and he had caught many people in the act.”

“I don’t want to be Vice President,” he told William Helm as they were rushing along a hall in the Senate Office Building, and, as Helm wrote later, anyone who saw the look on his face would have known he meant it.

For Truman, events were out of hand. These were three or four of the most critical days of his life and they were beyond his control, his destiny being decided for him by others once again.

Truman said later that he was completely stunned. “I was floored, I was sunk.” Reportedly his first words were “Oh, shit!” He himself recalled saying, “Well, if that’s the situation, I’ll have to say yes. But why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?”

Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, “unofficially but conclusively,” was the party’s nominee for Vice President.

think Senator Truman is one of the finest men I know.

But there had been nothing in Roosevelt’s experience like the night young Harry held the lantern as his mother underwent surgery, nothing like the Argonne, or Truman’s desperate fight for political survival in 1940.

The fact that Roosevelt had died like Lincoln in the last stages of a great war, and like Lincoln in April, almost to the day, were cited as measures both of Roosevelt’s greatness and the magnitude of the tragedy. But implicit also was the thought that Lincoln, too, had been succeeded by a lackluster, so-called “common man,” the ill-fated Andrew Johnson.

Only gradually would he reveal his own feelings, making plain that if anyone was stunned by the turn of fate, or worried over the future, or distressed by the inadequacies of the man stepping into the place of Franklin Roosevelt, it was Harry Truman.

He was urged to trust in God, keep his health, get enough sleep, eat right.

In Topeka, a doctor who was delivering a baby during the broadcast of the speech stopped to shake hands with the newborn citizen—to congratulate him for making his entrance at so auspicious a moment in history. “May I say,” wrote the doctor to Truman, “that in our locality I have never seen such unity of purpose as is manifest toward you and toward the administration you are beginning.” And he was a Republican, the doctor said.