Off the Record: The Private Papers ofHarry S. Truman
Ferrell, Robert H.
John Muggeridge is an instructor at Niagara College of Applied Arts and Technology in Welland, Ontario. OFF THE RECORD: THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF HARRYS. TRUMAN Edited by Robert H. Ferrell Harper and...
...He has no hesitation, for example, in calling Jesus Christ a Protestant, or in giving a list of human benefactors consisting of: Buddha, Jesus, Cincin-natus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson...
...Nixon, after all, tried on the same persona and was laughed out of the television studios...
...He is the one president in recent times to have escaped the myth-wreckers...
...Truman himself, however, remains the last Democratic pied piper whose music was not only followed but believed in...
...But the most disarming thing about Truman is the panache with which he parades his prejudices...
...When, for example, the House Un-American Activities Committee, as part of an inquiry into White's activities, "audaciously' ' (to use Professor Ferrell's revealing adverb) subpoenaed the ex-president, he refused to appear...
...In Off the Record we meet not only the familiar faces of Harry Truman, but also his familiar evasions...
...He laid the ghost of Henry Wallace without blunting Democratic progress leftwards...
...And, as his private papers make clear, he knew it...
...in happier show-business times Off the Record-would surely have been turned into Hello, Harry, a Broadway musical along the lines of Fiorello with a big Oval Office scene at the end of act one where the newly sworn-in president, accompanied by Bess, Margie, and a chorus of fedora-hatted party aides, celebrates his rise from Eastern District Judge to Chief Executive in a song called: "Ain't that Sum-pin...
...Another such document gap covers Truman's connection with the Alger Hiss affair...
...He was a Kissinger from Missouri...
...The closets containing his particular skeletons just don't seem to get broken into...
...and the Great post-Watergate Awakening, its Plains-speaking Jimmy...
...We cannot persuade ourselves that a president who calls his wife "the boss," never quite gets used to being served by butlers, and worries about making a public show of going to church could have led a double life...
...the Silent Majority, its Dirty Dick...
...He was Khrushchev to FDR's Stalin...
...The memos, diary entries, appointment sheets, and letters here assembled are all from the Harry S. Truman Library, a documentary Mount Rush-more which the late president busied himself for nearly twenty years carving his face in...
...Perhaps it is simply a case of folksiness conquering all...
...Hiss is not mentioned in Off the Record...
...He had a talent, above all, for making the shifting currents of American foreign policy sound like horse sense...
...Big money," he wrote, "has too much power and so have big unions-both are riding to a fall because I like neither...
...There, as far as Truman was concerned, the matter ended...
...They are synonymous.'' The antonym of both (as well, no doubt, as of Buddha, Jesus, and Woodrow Wilson) was the Republican party, to whose newspapers Truman gave what he seems to have considered a scientific appelation, the "sabotage press...
...Seven years later, when Joseph McCarthy's crusade had not yet become a witch-hunt and Bertrand Russell publicly bet a British television interviewer that the Wisconsin senator would be the next president, Truman, again quoting Scripture, told a visiting Bishop "that Stalin and his crowd had no moral code . . . and that all I wanted to do was to organize Exodus XX, Matthew V, VI & VII to save morals in the world...
...The un-stuffed-shirt-in-high-places image induces us to make the willing suspension of disbelief in its owner's duplicity...
...We meet in his pages those old campaign-trail favorites, the farmboy President, the Midwest wiseacre, the comradely comrade-in-arms, the fond family man...
...So I'm going to make a common sense, intellectually honest campaign...
...Trumanism is dead, destroyed by the fact that its agenda has been implemented, abroad in Vietnam, at home in our schools and public housing projects...
...The appeal of an enlightened Archie Bunker, however, still does not fully account for the kid-glove treatment that Truman continues to receive from the image-makers...
...What gave him the election was his average-American progressivism...
...not even a footnote...
...He believed in unions, but stood up to John L. Lewis...
...He boasted that he had stopped Tito from taking Trieste, at the same time that he was tacitly allowing the Russians everything east of the Elbe...
...The very sprightliness of his style seems to rule out subterfuge...
...Bentley a crook, and reminding his readers that White himself had testified before a congressional committee both as to his own loyalty and as to the untruthfulness of Chambers and Bentley...
...One of these concerns the famous Senate primary of 1934 which Truman won with the help of 50,000 fraudulent votes supplied by the Pendergasts of Kansas City, and which, incidentally, set him on the road to the White House...
...He campaigned for civil rights, but dismissed ERA as "a lot of hooey about equal rights...
...TRUMAN Edited by Robert H. Ferrell Harper and Row/$ 15.00 John Muggeridgc Off the Record, Robert H. Ferrell's edition of the private papers of Harry S. Truman, is nothing of the sort...
...He gave a small-town luster to big government...
...The Truman legend survives because Truman himself played an essential role in maintaining a bigger and more important legend: that of the Democratic party...
...But for some reason the Truman Years still do not have their Wheeler-Fair-Dealer Harry...
...Bentley had named him to the FBI as a Communist agent...
...And that's it...
...He worshipped at the shrine .of science and education but remained firmly attached to traditional values...
...The uncritical nature of Professor Ferrell's editing is not, however, surprising...
...he even, through the rhetorical wizardry of the Truman Doctrine, managed to make resigning Eastern Europe to the Soviets seem anti-Communist...
...He brought the New Deal down to earth...
...Why this should have been so neither the president nor his editor seems to have thought it worthwhile going into...
...Listening to popular music from the good old days is always pleasant...
...On the record, of course, Truman called the case against the ex-State Department official a "red herring...
...The truth stops here...
...This is the Harry S. Truman everyone knows...
...And now the Democratic party's image again needs refurbishing...
...In a memorandum dated January 1952, to dispell what Professor Ferrell calls "the usual loose talk about Truman's association years before with the Pendergast machine," the president gives the following explanation of that enigmatic contest: "I was elected to the Senate in 1934 over severe opposition in the Primary...
...Truman, as he often does, falls back on name-calling, labelling Chambers a louse and Mrs...
...With Kiss Me Jimmy having been a box office disaster, this may just be the right time to bring on Hello, Harry...
...The Truman everyone knows happens also to be the Truman everyone believes in...
...The whole election campaign of 1948 was an American version of the Twentieth Party Congress...
...It will be a novelty-and it will win.'' It did win...
...The only document touching on it in his published papers is a memorandum written in November 1953 concerning Harry Dexter White, a Hiss contemporary who continued to serve in the Truman administration despite the fact that both Whittaker Chambers and Mrs...
...In 1945, still warmed by the afterglow of victory, he called Stalin "honest, but smart as hell" and referred to the deepening confrontation with the Soviet Union as a "mote and beam affair...
...No man with a burdened conscience, we feel, would go around calling Senator Kefauver "cowfever" or describing how he ended a solitary dinner at the White House by "taking a hand bath in the finger bowl...
...Camelot has its Mattress Jack...
...What Professor Ferrell has xeroxed is the official Truman legend...
...I've no ax to grind," he wrote in 1959, "only the welfare of the United States and the Democratic Party...
...Truman's achievement was to make the leftism embraced by postwar Democrats look American...
...Reissuing the Truman legend may well, therefore, turn out to have been a shrewd publishing venture...
...By going into sixty of Missouri's 114 counties I won the nomination by a plurality of over 40,000 votes...
...I don't believe the USA wants any more fakirs," he wrote in his diary on July 16, 1948, "Teddy and Franklin are enough...
Vol. 14 • June 1981 • No. 6
