Truman – David McCullough, 1992 ★★★★

Historian as Cheerleader

When does an author’s enthusiasm for a subject bleed into full-blown boosterism while still holding together? I submit David McCullough’s Truman. It’s a fine history and marvelous narrative that nevertheless gets tinny and strained by giving Give-‘em-Hell Harry every break.

Is it a bad thing to be bought and paid for by machine politics? Not if you have good intentions. What about dropping those atomic bombs? Call it decisive leadership. That bloody war in Korea? Remember that famous phrase of his,“The buck stops here?” Well, it applies here, too, until the Chinese invaded and it became a bloody slog, then it all became General MacArthur’s fault.

McCullough sums up Truman as one of the greatest figures of his day, a modern-day Cincinnatus and the right man at the helm as the United States shifted from finishing a war to presiding over an uncertain peace:

The responsibilities he bore were like those of no other president before him, and he more than met the test.

Liking Harry S. Truman already, I found more to admire in McCullough’s 992-page biography, which shifts smoothly from the personal to the political and back. As both man and leader, Truman proved the adage of America as land of second acts. Almost middle-aged when he went into politics, after failing both as a farmer and a haberdasher, he became the substitute of the century when Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s sudden death made him President.

Truman was the product of striving Scotch-Irish immigrants who came to America and ventured west in search of opportunity. They could be a cussed lot: “Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest I am hard to turn,” was a common prayer of theirs McCullough relates.

One thing Truman makes clear, early and often, was that Harry was hard-nosed, quick to anger and not one to back down. “Inwardly Truman was an extremely frustrated, resentful, and angry man, worn thin by criticism, fed up with crises not of his making and with people who, as he saw it, cared nothing for their country, only their own selfish interests,” McCullough writes of Truman as President.

Yet there was some degree of compromise to the man from birth. When his parents couldn’t agree on “Shipp” or “Solomon” as a middle name, they split the difference and just went with “S.”

While his cousin Ethel Noland considered Truman a 19th-century man, McCullough notes Harry did take to the automobile from his earliest days as a politician. Once he was no longer President, he took every advantage of the opportunity to drive himself again. Image from http://www.jmarkpowell.com/harry-hits-the-road/.

Humble origins led many to underrate him, throughout his life. It took him many years to convince Bess Wallace to marry him, as her mother considered him low-class. Ma Wallace continued to rate him low even until the day of her death in 1952, which she spent in a large White House in Washington, D. C.

McCullough asks: Was Harry Truman an ordinary provincial American sadly miscast in the presidency? Or was he a man of above-average, even exceptional qualities and character, who had the makings of greatness?

For McCullough, as well as those who knew and admired Truman, a tensile simplicity lies at the center of a proper appreciation.

“He wanted all the facts he could get before he made up his mind,” McCullough quotes Clark Clifford, a longtime eminence grise among Washington Democrats who started out as Truman’s golden boy. “But if he could get only 80 percent of the facts in the time available, he didn’t let the missing 20 percent tie him up in indecision. He believed that even a wrong decision was better than no decision at all.”

A problem of Truman is that there is much too much Clifford and other like champions in McCullough’s telling. Through much of the book, it’s hard not to feel deafened by the sound of monument-building. You read of this or that brave Truman decision being shouted down by Neanderthal Republicans. McCullough soft-soaps the chronic cronyism, a dangerous predilection for centralizing power, and the odd emotional ventings to lay out a case of Truman as civil-rights pioneer, stolid Cold Warrior, and all-around decent guy.

It works, too, especially for the first 600 pages. Truman as a man could be tough to take but hard not to like. McCullough’s portrait of his late-blooming coming of age presents a masterclass of solid structuring set off by crisply-delivered details.

Favorite sections for me include McCullough’s recounting of Truman’s harrowing baptism of fire as an artillery officer in World War I; his early political work building roads as a Missouri administrator; and becoming an unlikely U. S. Senator chairing a committee that would get his country ready for the great adventure of World War II.

His pre-war Truman Committee became known as a straight-shooting, fiscally responsible body that got results:

Questioning the cause of troubles with the B-26 bomber built by the Glenn Martin Company, the committee was informed by Martin himself that the wings were not wide enough. Truman asked why the wings weren’t fixed. Martin said plans were too far along and that besides he already had the contract. Truman said that if that was how Martin felt, then the committee would see the contract was ended. Martin said he would correct the size of the wings.

Yet Truman worked under a cloud though the early part of his public career, one which haunted him well into the 1940s and beyond. Simply put, he owed his career to the patronage of one of the more corrupt big bosses of his time, Kansas City’s Jim Pendergast.

With McCullough, I got the sense that Truman’s origins were perhaps suspect but wholly secondary. Truman didn’t profit personally from being part of the Pendergast machine, except by being promoted for higher office, a result of high competence and not high crimes. If others around him made out like bandits, that was not on Harry.

Truman, at left, standing next to his main benefactor, Tom Pendergast, at the 1936 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Three years later, "Boss Tom" went to jail on corruption charges. Image from https://thepublici.blogspot.com/2016/10/follow-leader.html?m=1.

McCullough relates an amazing piece of self-examination Truman wrote to himself justifying his inaction at such graft:

“I wonder if I did the right thing to put a lot of no account sons of bitches on the payroll and pay other sons of bitches more money for supplies than they were worth in order to satisfy the political powers and save $3,500,000. I believe I did do right. Anyway I’m not a partner of any of them and I’ll go out poorer in every way than I came into office.”

That, for McCullough, is central to Truman’s defense. Even when he had chances to profit, as when directing the building of roads, he opted to sell a piece of his own family farm to the state at a moderate price. He left it for others to clean up, content to do right by the taxpayers.

McCullough’s ability to draw open the curtain, captured in the above excerpt and countless other times, makes Truman compelling.

A Secret Service agent was McCullough’s source for a dramatic encounter in 1948 between Truman, then locked in a difficult re-election bid, with Jimmy Roosevelt, Franklin’s son and a leading California Democrat. Jimmy had not supported Truman’s re-nomination, but tried to greet him amicably. Harry cut him short:

“Your father asked me to take this job. I didn’t want it…and if your father knew what you are doing to me, he would turn over in his grave. But get this straight: whether you like it or not, I am going to be the next President of the United States. That will be all. Good day.”

For McCullough, such splenetive moments were an understandable response to the weight of the Presidency. No moment would weigh heavier on his legacy than the one which ended World War II, dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Here as elsewhere, McCullough shepherds us through Truman’s thought processes, making clear how Truman understood those bombs as terrible remedies to a deadly conflict. McCullough does present the carnage, but also stresses how Truman needed some way to staunch the flow of Gold Star mothers with the war already long won. He even brings up Japanese war atrocities as justification. Even if you agree with the bombings, like me, you may find the author pushes too hard to keep you seeing Truman in the best light.

After the war was won, the United States would share the world with its fellow victor, a bellicose Soviet Union and its ruthless leader Joseph Stalin. An era of continuous crisis followed.

Truman meets Stalin, second from left, at a postwar conference in Potsdam, Germany. Also in the picture at right was British leader Winston Churchill, who counseled Truman to be ever-wary of the Russian.

Others, notably many who had been close to Roosevelt, counselled softness with “Uncle Joe.” Truman took up a get-tough policy instead. When Soviet foreign minister V. M. Molotov complained of Truman’s tone at their first meeting, Truman was famously short in reply: “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.”

McCullough notes a discrepancy in the records; one American observer remembered Truman merely dismissing Molotov instead, if somewhat brusquely. Whichever version is true, the message could not have been clearer: There was a new sheriff in town.

“Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making,” McCullough quotes Truman telling his Secretary of State James Byrnes. “Only one language do they understand, ‘How many divisions have you?’”

Later Byrnes would be replaced for not being tough enough with the Kremlin. Yet Truman still took fire from his right, for being an appeaser who lost China and was soft on communist sympathizers at home.

McCullough presents Truman as doggedly following a middle path between surrender and Armageddon:

“If we can put this tremendous machine of ours, which has made victory possible, to work for peace, we can look forward to the greatest age in the history of mankind. That is what we propose to do.”

In this regard, the high point of Truman’s presidency as McCullough tells it was the Marshall Plan, a massive and successful aid package to rebuild parts of Europe not within the Soviet sphere of influence.

The low point was a hotter war, when North Korea invaded South Korea. Initially, American forces were able to beat them back, particularly when Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Truman’s man on the ground, launched a surprise amphibious assault on Inchon. But then China, newly Communist and then under Russian influence, joined the fray. Truman soon fired MacArthur for wanting to go nuclear in response, but never was able to decisively rout the Communists, leaving in place an unstable situation that continues to this day.

For McCullough, Truman deserved credit for not escalating the war, ignoring the hawks and fault-finders of right and left. Here, as in other places, the author gets bogged down by a surfeit of admiration.

The last three hundred pages covering Truman’s presidency felt like a minor letdown that way. McCullough harps on Truman’s admirable instincts and downplays disappointing results. He allows for one major mistake, a loyalty program designed to root out Communists in American government, but when it comes to the corruption of people around him, or Truman’s ill-conceived power play to take over the steel industry, McCullough finds others to blame for his hero’s stumbles.

When Truman campaigns against his eventual successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, laying it on thick with rhetoric about Eisenhower’s perceived treason for sharing a stage with rabid Truman-basher Joseph McCarthy, McCullough seems nonplussed Ike carried a grudge.

This laudatory tone gets to be a weight. Take this over-the-top description of Truman’s second inauguration:

The whole pageant struck countless viewers, including many who had witnessed numerous inaugurations, as profoundly stirring. It was a day of dedication for the democratic spirit, with all elements large and small momentarily in harmony.

The only enduring Truman flaw McCullough seems to allow was too much loyalty to those who did not serve him well in turn. He quotes one war comrade, Edgar Hinde: “Anybody who’s ever been a friend of his…they’ve got to hit him right in the face before he’ll drop them. And I think that’s one of Harry’s big faults.”

Overall, it’s Truman the straight-shooter who shines through McCullough’s account, convincing votes across the country to vote for him during a grueling 1948 campaign conducted on the back of a train. At one stop in Montana, late at night, he emerged before a crowd in pajamas and bathrobe. “I thought you would like to see what I look like, even if I didn’t have on any clothes,” he announced.

The result of that campaign would be, until 2016, the greatest upset in American presidential politics, one which continues to mystify. Dean Acheson, Truman’s last Secretary of State, explained his boss’s charisma thusly: “He didn’t make different decisions with different people. He called everyone together. You were all heard and you all got the answer together. He was a square dealer all the way through.”

For McCullough, this is the key to Truman’s lasting greatness. What you saw was what you got. Truman the book overeggs the pudding in too many places, but remains a classic account of a singularly American success story who wore his bathrobe like a Roman toga.