Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography Of Harry S. Truman – Merle Miller, 1974 ★★½

Cocktails with Harry

While written as an oral history of Harry S. Truman, Plain Speaking flows like a morality play in which a hero imparts life lessons and reveals his inner self to one gradually won over by his goodness. But can you trust what you read?

Merle Miller was hired in 1961 by television producer David Susskind to interview Truman for a documentary. Miller had been a published critic of Truman, in particular his decisions to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Yet over time, as the two had a series of meetings to discuss this Truman TV project, Miller found much to like about Give ‘em Hell Harry.

Nothing came of the Susskind show, but more than ten years on, with Truman dead and Watergate in the headlines, Miller figured the time was right to showcase an honest president. “The memory of him has never been sharper, never brighter than it is now, a time when menacing, shadowy men are everywhere among us,” he notes in his Preface.

A candid, straightforward tone is established early when Truman discusses how his becoming president (by the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945) shaped his approach to office:

“I was there more or less by accident you might say, and I just never got to thinking that I was anything special. It’s very easy to do that in Washington, and I’ve seen it happen to a lot of fellas. But I did my best not to let it happen to me. I tried never to forget who I was and where I’d come from and where I was going back to. And if you can do that, things usually work out all right in the end.”

A lifelong reader with weak eyesight, Truman wore glasses even as a boy. Miller quotes a childhood neighbor, Morton Chiles: “He carried books, and we’d carry a baseball bat. So we called him a sissy.” Image from https://historicmissourians.shsmo.org/historicmissourians/name/t/trumanh/

Truman spoke about his decisions in office, his policies, and his philosophy. The dialogue captured between him and Miller was often revealing, if a bit cantankerous:

Mr. President, if he hadn’t sold that land, I guess you would have been born rich.

“I guess that’s true, but people who spend too much time thinking about things like that are likely to wind up feeling sorry for themselves. So I haven’t given it much thought… Anyway, if I’d been rich, I wouldn’t have wound up President.”

And given a choice…

“I didn’t have a choice. What’s your next question?”

Truman's 1948 upset reelection victory against Republican Thomas Dewey may have surprised everyone else but not Truman, who told Miller he slept fine the night before even as he trailed significantly in key states, knowing he would awake victorious. Image from https://middleburgeccentric.com/2016/11/editorial-dewey-defeats-truman/.

Before proceeding further, I should get into the questions about Plain Speaking’s validity. Historian Robert Hugh Farrell described a disconnect after listening to Truman’s recorded interviews with Miller in a 1995 American Heritage article titled “Plain Faking:” “The tapes do not support the book’s text – not by any means.”

He and co-author Francis H. Heller called several things into question, including Miller’s claims that many of his interviews – unrecorded – took place at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant and that Truman often tossed back multiple alcoholic drinks beforehand. The article notes Truman didn’t dine out like that in public, and he was at most a light drinker. Many anecdotes related in the book are similarly challenged.

David McCullough also threw some shade Miller’s way in his celebrated 1992 bio Truman, saying the book’s quotes are often “more harsh than [Truman] meant or that he indicated at the time.”

Truman meeting General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded United Nations troops in Korea. In Plain Speaking Truman speaks of a standoff that McCullough notes never happened. Miller quotes Truman on MacArthur: “I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.” Image from https://mwi.usma.edu/military-officers-politics-fraught-relationship-macarthur-truman/.

Miller certainly presents an uninhibited Truman, especially when lighting into Richard Nixon, a political has-been in 1961 about to become one again in 1974; as well as Dwight Eisenhower, who replaced Truman as president and made Nixon his running mate.

Truman calls Nixon an SOB but saves his harshest fire for Eisenhower:

“It’s too bad, too, what happened to him, because he had opportunities that no man I know had. But you take a man that has been educated in the professional military, especially if he comes from a section of the country where all the folks are plain folks the way that fellow did, it seems to go to his head some way or another. I don’t know what causes it, but it’s too bad. It oughtn’t to happen.”

President Truman (in white hat) rides next to Eisenhower while Gen. Omar Bradley sits on Ike's left. In Miller's account, Truman calls Eisenhower a lazy president and an overrated general. Image from https://www.pinterest.it/pin/323907398178010585/.

No question Truman disliked Eisenhower, who in 1952 ran successfully against Truman’s record and whom Truman felt was ungrateful. But would he have gone on this long about Ike to someone he hardly knew?

Truman did talk to Miller, and even arranged for Miller to interview former colleagues like his secretary of state, Dean Acheson. Even the “Plain Faking” article shows Truman saying something like what Miller quotes him as saying, with subtle if important differences.

Some of it may come down to memory’s imperfections. As Truman himself puts it in Plain Speaking:

“I guess you might say that is…was really the first time I realized that there is often a considerable difference between what people write about themselves and what is written about them…even when the writer has set out to tell the truth…and the way things really are.”

Truman with his daughter Margaret. When Washington Post critic Paul Hume wrote a blistering review of Margaret's singing, Truman was furious: "I wrote him a letter saying that if I could get my hands on him I'd bust him in the jaw and kick his nuts out," Miller records Truman saying. Image from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/flashback-harry-truman-also-slammed-one-of-his-daughters-critics.

My reason for not completely trusting Plain Speaking goes back to the way it reads, and how much of it comes back to Truman validating Miller’s own views. Whether discoursing on bad politicians, officious generals, stupid religious people, or the lying press, the two men are so much in sync you wonder where one’s thinking stops and the other’s begins:

Why is it do you suppose that Republicans so often make mistakes like that? Or seem to. Is it stupidity?

“No. Most of them are smart enough. It’s just – this is only my opinion, of course – it’s just that they don’t seem to know or care anything about people. Not all of them but a lot of them don’t.”

At some points in his book, Miller admits holding back on a temptation to probe “discrepancies” in some of Truman’s answers: “The reason I never did was that I wanted our conversations to continue.”

Miller’s lack of a critical remove from his subject, his desire to heartily second Truman’s harshest jibes, and his need to rant about everything from the producers on the Susskind show – “they all had two things in common, incompetence and stupidity” – to the unmitigated rottenness of every president after Truman…well, it’s a lot of baggage.

When Miller interviewed Truman in 1961, John F. Kennedy was the new president. Here Kennedy confers with Truman on January 20, 1961. Truman's critique of Kennedy is withering throughout Plain Speaking, and another way critics say Miller distorted Truman's words. Image from https://www.shapell.org/historical-perspectives/between-the-lines/new-presidency-first-100-days/.

Yet with all that, something must be said for Plain Speaking. It did a great deal to build Truman’s legacy.

For one thing, it was perfect timing. Watergate had plunged already-faltering public trust in the presidency near to the bottom; people wanted to be reminded of a national leader who was straightforward to a fault and famously said the buck stopped with him. You get that here.

For another, Plain Speaking was a callback to better days. While a proud progressive, Miller frames Truman through a nostalgic lens. He quotes Truman’s cousin Ethel Noland to this end:

“There are many things about this modern time that are desirable and good and amazing. But there are things that are fine and substantial and eternal about the nineteenth century that we will do well to hold on to. And Harry Truman is very much a man of the nineteenth century.”

Harry with his wife, Bess, whom he called "the Boss." A remote, somewhat cold character in Plain Speaking, Bess kept her distance from Miller, who recalls his horror when a TV technician asked her to get him a glass of water. Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/6942186542.

The book is also quite entertaining. That may be because it plays fast and loose with its supposed source, and is a bit shallow in the way it presents Truman’s time in office, but it is a very easy read.

For example, Truman describes his pronounced lack of interest in becoming Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944, to the point of supporting someone else. It took a room full of high Democratic poohbahs and a phone call from Roosevelt himself before Truman finally acquiesced. “If it had been an offer, I’d have turned it down,” he tells Miller.

After Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948, he remembered getting an earful at that summer’s party convention from Southern delegates. To one woman, he responded by reciting the Bill of Rights from memory: “I guess I lost her support for sure, but I could…you can always get along without the support of people like that.”

Merle Miller. Among his published works before Plain Speaking was a book about his homosexuality, On Being Different, and another about the misadventures of writing for television, Only You, Dick Daring! He died in 1986. Image from https://www.wnyc.org/story/merle-miller-plain-speaking/.

Truman’s patriotism is often on display; so too is a splenetic character which may be Truman’s own or Miller’s imaginative reconstruction. I suspect a hybrid, but whatever the case, it makes Truman often come across as bitter and thin-skinned.

This is a bit ironic given Truman’s self-proclaimed philosophy: “You’ll notice if you read your history, that the work of the world gets done by people who aren’t bellyachers.”

Given Miller’s criticisms of Truman’s A-bomb use going in, one might expect more made of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But greater attention is paid to his upset re-election in 1948 and why he opted to defend South Korea in 1950. On the latter point, I was surprised to see Miller shift from hating on conservatives to bristling at revisionist historians who favored accommodation with North Korea and Red China.

I think Miller did tell the truth as best he could, while letting his own negative enthusiasms infect the tone of Truman’s comments on Ike, Nixon, and others. This defect grows more pronounced as the narrative continues, but I did feel somewhere at the bottom of all the exaggeration lay a genuine version of Truman, snappishly witty and eager to give you a piece of his mind. Just don’t think the buck stops here.