Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S Truman
Donovan, Robert J.
of a letter to the Emperor entitle Herzen (who at one time himself addressed Alexander II in most eulogistic terms) to describe him opprobriously as "the grey haired Magdalene whose teeth and hair...
...After all, he did fail, prior to the outbreak of the Korean War, to build a military force capable of honoring the political obligations his administration had taken on in the name of "containment...
...The great merit of Robert Donovan's second volume in his history of the Truman Administration is that it reconstructs, better than anything else in print today, the reasons why contemporaries regarded Truman's final term as a failure...
...Still, the composite picture of Turgenev which emerges from this small portion of his actual correspondence goes far in dispelling the denigrating myths about the man who was not only a great writer, but one of the most civilized and attractive members of the European republic of letters of his time...
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...Still Turgenev's inherent generosity of spirit led him to reproach gently, rather than to pay Herzen back in his own money: "Yes, the Emperor who did not know me at all nonetheless realized that he was dealing with an honest person...
...Did or didn't they...
...Why did this masterful portrayer and avowed lover of Russian, life, especially rural life, choose to spend the bulk of his adult life in the West...
...It is not by such means that we ought to move ahead...
...These are all useful correctives to a view of Truman that has become somewhat romanticized with the passage of time...
...God save us from such a disasterl j in the [Polish] Tsardom, li revolt and any conspiracy, c, bring harm both to Polat Russia...
...The Russians, to the extent that they entered into these accounts at all, usually did so in the role of innocent victims...
...This viewpoint would acknowledge some American responsibility for the escalation of the Cold War: in Washington's failure to distinguish publicly between varieties of Communism, for example, or in the overcommitment that arose from the confusion of peripheral with vital interests, or in the tendency to exaggerate the nature of the Soviet threat in order to get needed appropriations through Congress...
...All of this only reinforced a conclusion historians had come to sometime earlier: that Truman had indeed been one of the more impressive...
...Now, you will feel, you are getting closer to the experience, the.authentic heart and horror of it, than ever...
...It requires an effort, then, to recall that Truman himself left office after a humiliating rebuff by the Supreme Court (in the street seizure case of 1952), under accusations that he was perpetuating American involvement in a no-win war without congressional approval, that he had tolerated and even " sought to conceal official misconduct, and that he had, as a consequence, brought the presidency into disrepute...
...Not only Republicans but Democrats as well-to Truman's disgust-ran against his record in 1952...
...and you will have been through some of his convalescences in his actual autobiography (Siegfried's Journey 1916-1920...
...Rather, his account falls within what is now coming to be called the "post-revisionist" phase of Cold War historiography...
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...Eulogies of the 33rd President therefore contrasted sharply with revelations about the 37th, with the result that Truman became a kind of instant folk-hero...
...Parts of the diaries show things as we believe they ought to be...
...they stress the moderate (and mostly nonmilitary) nature of the early American response...
...His most recent book is Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford University Press...
...One can only hope that he will now turn his critical historian's eye-as well as his reportorial ear-to the Eisenhower years as well...
...meanwhile Truman's own blunt and abrasive personal behavior, so charming to subsequent generations, struck contemporaries as undignified, demeaning, and inconsistent with what most Americans expected in a President...
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...and they emphasize the extent to which the American "empire," assuming there was such a thing, arose as much at the invitation of those worried about the Russians as by the impositions of rapacious capitalists and militarists in Washington...
...twentieth-century Presidents, both because of his role in laying down the foundations of postwar American foreign policy, and because of his anticipation-though not achievement-of domestic reforms Lyndon Johnson would put into effect as the Great Society two decades later...
...He was born, or rather reached his manhood, at a time when an enlightened Russian could well believe that his country, and without any violent convulsions, could be steered onto the path of freedom and civilized governance...
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...How some of these problems keep reappearing in our own time l The still quite young Turgenev confesses in 1849 to his life-long companion, Pauline Viardot, how shattered he was at news that the Russian army was defeating the Hungarians rebelling against the Habsburg autocracy...
...But it is the portrait of Truman himself that is of greatest interest: he was not always as decisive and free from anxiety as he sought to appear...
...We expect to see the indolent fox-hunter and part-time poet go off to the Front with a splendid sense of purposefulness...
...Donovan is too good a historianand too good a reporter, for that matter-to accept that extreme viewpoint...
...Rock music groups crooned his virtues, T-shirts bearing his likeness blossomed on youthful chests, and Gerald Ford-no Truman admirer in his earlier days-now pointedly hung his portrait...
...Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, the editor of these journals, thrills you with their immediacy in his introduction: "Siegfried's handwriting was always firm and legible, but these diaries were written in tiny notebooks, sometimes in pencil, often by the light of a solitary candle in dug-out or billet, and some of the names of French villages and hamlets are hard to decipher...
...With his friends Turgenev was quite matter of fact about his sexual encounters with women of the lower social orders, an almost inevitable reflection of his upbringing in a serfowning society, and of the social stratum from which he came...
...As his political opinions, so has Turgenev's life been subjected to much criticism and occasional sneers...
...The tsarist government's attempts to bestow a modest degree of political autonomy in Poland had only increased political turbulence in that unhappy land...
...His long absences from the country of his birth cannot be attributed merely to his passion for Pauline (and after that passion receded, he still continued to crave her and her family's companionship...
...The result is a lean, taut, but vivid narrative that combines archival revelations with a keen sense of what things were like at the time...
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...Years later, upon his retirement from the Los Angeles Times, he embarked upon the perilous course of writing history, not solely from his own personal recollections-indeed, these rarely intrude in either volume-but rather TUMULTUOUS YEARS: THE PRESIDENCY OF HARRY S TRUMAN Robert J. Donovan/W.W...
...Well, it is difficult even for a great man to transcend the conventions of his time particularly concerning a woman he loved...
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...were being advanced within the precincts of New Left revisionism some years back...
...by 1917 Sassoon wants to get some "death and bitterness and anger" into his poems: he wants language not to rhapsodize, but to excoriate...
...This great novel was for some a eulogy of the young radicals, and of their creed-the term it gave notorietynihilism...
...General Harry Vaughan "wore a general's uniform the way people nowadays wear Levi's and shirts...
...In discussing Joe McCarthy's famous canard that too much "bourbon and Benedictine" caused Truman to fire MacArthur, for example, Donovan wonders, with the good sense that comes from having been there, whether anyone can really imagine the embattled Chief Executive imbibing the latter beverage...
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...Presidents' reputations always depend, to some extent, upon the performances of their successors...
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...Post-revisionism" has not received the attention it deserves outside professional academic circles, although within those circles, it is rapidly becoming the dominant viewpoint...
...there is none of the detached theorizing or blubbery viscosity that afflict most academic writing...
...Truman had the good sense to pass away late in 1972, just before the full extent of the Watergate scandal became clear...
...TX 77098 37 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983...
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...to see him turn bitter and-protesting...
...The older Turgenev is far from a Russian chauvinist, but he no longer believes that violence and rebellion are desirable pathways to freedom...
...Norton/$19.95 John Lewis Gaddis 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 from the mountains of source material now available at the Truman Library...
...personnel in Spanish, French, German...
...I was born too late or too early...
...The writer himself was appalled by the controversy over his book, a book that transcends the passionate arguments of the moment and whose main motif is a compassionate and insightful depiction of the perennial conflict of generations...
...At home, needed reforms languished while petty corruption grew...
...Senator Knowland was "an intense moose of a man...
...On-the-Green Guilford...
...He failed to anticipate the Korean War, failed to keep China from intervening, and failed to end it...
...It is important to distinguish these criticisms, though, from those that...
...As White House correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune during the Truman presidency, Donovan was able to observe at first hand many of the events he describes...
...To hell with all nationalistic feelingl" he wrote...
...Donovan describes him during his last two years in office as periodically depressed, irresolute, given to whiling away long hours in poker games with cronies, at one point too shaky and exhausted even to sign his name...
...Personal reasons apart, he found the atmosphere of Russia after the mid-1860s when the great era of reforms came to an end intolerable...
...I must pay my debt...
...The government now turned to repression and partial backtracking on the reforms: the young radicals were now more and more drawn to conspiracies and terrorism...
...Donovan is at his best sketching personalitie s. Dean Acheson, he tells us, found it difficult to get along with Franklin Roosevelt because "if any patronizing was to be done, Acheson preferred to do it...
...As is almost inevitable in any anthology, the process of selection employed here has not been uniformly successful...
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...Robert Donovan's exce'lent narrative, though not as analytical as many of the more specialized "post-revisionist" accounts, is nonetheless within the spirit of that approach, and could well serve general readers as a first-rate introduction to what is going on in the field...
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...He failed to prepare the nation for what he knew would be the inevitable victory of Communism in China, nor did he do all he could have to minimize the resulting domestic backlash...
...Others thought it a deliberate caricature of the "new men" and their idealistic strivings...
...Truman also had the good sense to hold back until after his death his most pungent personal correspondence and diaries, so that when these were released-and published to a wider and more appreciative audience than one might expect for presidential documentsthey appeared, not as an old man's vindictive spleen-ventings, but as the frank and feisty, pronouncements of John Lewis Gaddis teaches history at Ohio University...
...He had been entreated to stay and was tempted to do so: "But why, to what purpose...
...0 Harry S Truman, in retrospect, owes something to Richard Nixon...
...To the extent that revisionism is active these days, it is more in connection with the Eisenhower Administration, although here (appropriately) there is a great, bland, complacent consensus: recently opened papers at the Eisenhower Library at Abilene have caused scales to fall from the eyes of orthodox, New Left, and post revisionist scholars alike, and all emerge, blinking from the sunlight reflected off the grain elevators that abut that edifice, convinced that Ike was a genius...
...He was, in their eyes, a cynical manipulator of public opinion, smearing legitimate opposition at home with the tar brush of anti-Communism while pursuing policies abroad calculated toward the relentless aggrandizement of American power...
...In 1879 he would summarize his impression from a recent visit home in one word: "compassion-profound compassion for our marvellous young peoplesmale and female-who are simply suffocating from the lack of air...
...CT 06437 ; Name , Address 1 City ; Stale/Zip 1 I am partcularty interested in (check choice): 0 Spanish 0 French 0 German 0 Polish s7 Greek 0 Russian U Hausa 0 Czech , 0 Bulgarian 0 Turkish 0 Vietnamese El Other 4% li»tarrMMMMMMM= go SIEGFRIED SASSOON DIARIES, 1915-1918 Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis / Faber and Faber/ $19.95 Thomas Mallon Bullish on Braces...
...It is the kind of situation that cries out for Donovan's compensatory sense of how things actually were at the time-for he was If you have read much of Siegfried Sassoon, you will, in opening these diaries, be letting him take you back to the Great War for the fourth time...
...And, indeed, we see some of that tortured movement taking place according to Thomas Mallon, currently on leave at Cambridge University, teaches English at Vassar College...
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...you will have been there with George Sherston in the only slightly fictionalized Memoirs of an Infantry Officer...
...to see him get those illusions blasted out of him by the sound of 5.9 shells and the sight of dead men's hands sticking out of the soil...
...On December 3, 1915 he hopes to die the same death his brother did at Gallipoli: "I have lived well and truly since the war began, and have made my sacrifices...
...an American natural: the last unpasteurized, un-homogenized, noartificial-ingredients politician...
...and old friends, who one would think knew me well, had no doubts about attributing baseness to me and trumpeting it in print-" Turgenev's dilemma, that of a civilized and compassionate man in a society permeated by violent political passions, of a believer in progress and reform in an intellectual milieu increasingly polarized between the partisans of revolution and those of reaction, was seen especially in the response to his Fathers and Sons...
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...of a letter to the Emperor entitle Herzen (who at one time himself addressed Alexander II in most eulogistic terms) to describe him opprobriously as "the grey haired Magdalene whose teeth and hair fell out from repentance...
...In 1915 the stars above the marchers' heads are "immortal diadems...
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...And so we have Turgenev writing in 1861: "There is a rumor in Paris that a revolt has erupted in Warsaw...
...Despite the research that has gone into these books, Donovan's prose retains a reporter's sense of immediacy...
...but twelve months later "the thought of death is horrible, where last year it was a noble and inevitable dream...
...Robert Donovan has had two distinguished careers, and this book-together with its companion volume, published in 1977-is the product of both of them...
...there, too, and in 1956 published what is still one of the best journalistic accounts of that administration, Eisenhower: The Inside Story...
...To followers of that persuasion, Truman came across as more devious than inept, as cunning rather than clumsy...
...But "post-revisionists" nevertheless assign chief responsibility for the Cold War to the Russians...
...For a person with a heart there is only one fatherland-democracy, and if the Russians are victorious, it will be delivered a mortal blow...
...It is this sense of what things were like, I think, that leads Donovan to stress more than academic historians have the extent to which Truman was seen, at the time, as a failure...
...Yet both the gossip monger's and the biographer's voyeuristic impulses have been thwarted by the writer's reticence concerning his exact relationship with the great love of his life, the singer Pauline Viardot...
...his approval rating at the time he left office approximated that of Richard Nixon in 1974...
...The letters, then, help us gain a better perspective on the man who in many ways epitomized, just as his stories often masterfully describe, the vexing problems of nineteenthcentury Russian life...
...You will have been there in his brutal and ironic poems...
Vol. 16 • July 1983 • No. 7
