Eminentoes/One Hundred Years of Harry Truman
Hamby, Alonzo L.
ponent's abysmal lack of them, that he got gentler, less negative coverage. Reporters thought him kooky and illinformed on some issues, but he wasn't as unpleasant as his opponent, who had...
...Even with the exercise of extreme caution, however, it is evident that the man who wrote these letters had not passed beyond the emotional stage of a teenager...
...Some of II America's best writers and most incisive I thinkersmincluding Tom Bethell, Edith II Efron, James Oberg, Alan Reynolds, William Tucker, and Walter Williams, to name a few...
...It isn't polls or public opinion of the moment that counts...
...It is right and wrong and leadership--men with fortitude, honesty and a belief in the right that makes epochs in the history of the world...
...Throughout his correspondence to her and the "diary" entries he wrote to himself, he insists she was the only girl he ever cared for from the age of six on...
...It is inevitable that in any collection this large, some will be familiar, but the most devoted Truman aficionado is likely to be surprised and delighted by others...
...A ~ l . l r r l c CA#JINOAN @p 'l'aw IIL~I H~STON _9 AUSTIN I a side visit to the Truman Library in Independence, Mo., hoping to find a few documents on Harry Truman's army service for a book he was preparing on World War I. He discovered that the library had over the past few years acquired and made available Truman's private correspondence and diaries...
...He made Alonzo L. Hamby teaches history at Ohio University...
...Most people think education vouchers are just a gleam in Milton Friedman's eye, but Reason found that they have been used in Vermont for decades, giving parents a choice of schools...
...He possessed, indeed cultivated, a deep-rooted hatred of the press...
...How does a biographer deal with this...
...His business had failed, leaving debt hanging over him for years...
...Of course, I'm too busy to do much of it, but some weekends, I just have to read...
...as a sixtyish President on vacation at Key West, stripped to the waist and proudly displaying a big fish that didn't get away...
...And after they were married on June 28, 1919, they spent an astonishing amount of time apart from each other...
...He gave all this up at the request of his father for what turned out to be more than a decade of dreary, unrewarding farm work...
...Private weather forecasting...
...as a wrinkled, shriveled old man in his late eighties posing for the artist Thomas Hart Benton...
...His traditionalism made him appear more conservative than he really was, and he drew praise from millions of older people who had voted against him in 1948...
...When he began his correspondence with "Bessie" on December 31, 1910, he was a 26-year-old man who had allowed his family to make critical decisions for him and had never experienced a steady relationship with a girl...
...a dramatization of the Vietnam war from a local theater company's point of view...
...He truly believed that the music critics who panned daughter Margaret's singing were indirectly attacking him...
...But it would be deceptive to leave it at that...
...5.95 paper...
...Reporters thought him kooky and illinformed on some issues, but he wasn't as unpleasant as his opponent, who had been quoted from time to time as suggesting that reporters were interested mainly in gaffes and incautious statements, not serious matters of government...
...Over and over I would get the same response: "Wow, that's really great...
...One suspects Truman would sympathize with the direction of Reagan's foreign policy and would find Mondale, Hart, and Jackson more appalling than appealing...
...What follows are some of the random thoughts of a would-be biographer upon reading the Ferrell corpus...
...My own favorites included Harry as a 12-year-old looking like Little Lord Fauntleroy...
...An intense cultural traditionalist, he hated virtually all the artistic manifestations of modernity, whether in music, art, or architecture...
...Several times he told her he was " a damned, sentimental old fool...
...I love to read...
...His personal files contain scores of angry unsent letters 6 that demonstrate a capability for sheer rage unhealthy in a public leader...
...You know, I love to read...
...their lines of church authority ran from the bottom up...
...In the patriotic tradition of Cincinnatus, one of his great heroes, he went off to war at the age of 34, conducted himself courageously, and believed in the Cincinnatian ideal of the citizen soldier ever after...
...To find y o u r e x p i r a t i o n d a t e , look on the very first line o f y o u r magazine address label...
...Add $8.00 if delivery is outside North America ($36.00 for airmail...
...Without disparaging his genuine love for his wife, we had better give some attention to the other possibility...
...Truman had an uncanny ability to transform the smallest criticism into a personal insult...
...Yet he remained devoted to her without qualm...
...as a Captain of Artillery sitting without his glasses for his World War I army identity card and thereby seeming somehow more the squarejawed, hard-muscled farmer that he was...
...Most of my associates think there's something wrong with me because I believe in that oath I took in a certain little Episcopal church in Independence, Missouri, about twentyfive years ago...
...One cannot help but wonder how they would react to each other today...
...Everyone knows he had a terrible temper, but not much attention has been paid to its sources...
...If he had doubts about an issue, he talked himself into believing in it...
...Or does one assume that he had not developed the inner strength to make his own way in life...
...It's no wonder a recent survey showed that Reason is America's fastestgrowing magazine of ideas...
...Name Address City State Zip Telephone engagement in 1913, six long years passed before their wedding, apparently because Harry felt it necessary to achieve success and make money on his own before taking on the responsibilities of wife and family...
...He even assumed as part of his interest in the farm a portion of his father's debts...
...There Is opportun, ity in erlca...
...For example, when I first moved here, eight glorious years ago, I often told new acquaintby Benjamin J. Stein ances that I was a writer...
...He never stopped hating his enemies and unnecessarily invented a few...
...Reason also turns up provocative proposals for change: _9 A wall against war for Israel...
...I I I I I l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l REASON, Box 28897, San Diego, CA 92128 4021 II I 1 l Who writes for Reason...
...The oversize title-page photo of A Centenary Remembrance shows us President Harry S. Truman speaking in Los Angeles...
...He hated ostentation and showmanship even to the point of priding himself on his lack of oratorical skill...
...Yet she paid little attention to him when they were in school together, and they apparently rarely chanced to meet You may not agree with everything you read in Reason--but we guarantee you won't be bored...
...And Jimmy Carter wound up losing the presidency...
...Harry Truman matured late in life...
...Does one praise him for commendable family loyalty...
...Truman, the library came into possession of some 1,200 letters from her husband that she had saved over a period of half a century...
...When H a r r y ' s career took him to Washington, Bess continued to spend weeks on end in Independence at the old gingerbread mansion her grandf a t h e r had built...
...Among our recent discoveries: _9 Towering entrepreneurs...
...At the age of 77, he was so embarrassed in admitting an attractive young female stenographer to his New York hotel suite that he left the door open and addressed her as "young fella...
...The suggestion was irrefutably true, but your average reporter didn't see it that way...
...Harry's letters to Bess from the beginning of their courtship through their marriage display something that the modern mind finds difficult to comprehend--a single-minded fixation on one woman that makes Romeo Montague look like a gadabout by comparison...
...Please bill me for $12...
...For a fuller selection, see Monte M. Poen, Strictly Personal and Confidential: The Unsent Letters of Harry S. Truman (Little, Brown, $10.95...
...In 1911, she turned down his first proposal, but he continued with a pursuit made all the more difficult by a farm boy's relative isolation and by his inability to purchase an automobile...
...It will be a mass infusion of high culture into the high capital of mass culture...
...What would Jesus Christ have preached if he'd taken a poll in Israel...
...Indeed, few ordinary Americans can recite Truman's accomplishments beyond his "decision" to use the atomic bomb at the end of World War II (less difficult and agonizing than is popularly believed...
...as a tousle-haired bank clerk at 18...
...Part of it, including some lengthy personal musings, was in Truman's own hand...
...His deficiencies, like his strengths, were those of the common man...
...Reason's editors look behind the headlines to dig out stories that don't even occur to other media...
...For decades the SecI urities and Exchange Commission has been subjecting financial newsletters to licensing and censorship...
...He defined liberalism as a concern for all the people and played the game, of interest group politics reluctantly and reservedly...
...So I close the door to the pool house and I just sit there and read the newspaper for a couple of hours...
...Instinctively, he grasped one of the central truths of this century--that the totalitarianism of the Left was as reprehensible as that of the Right...
...Or does it tell us that, whatever the reason, Harry Truman had a lot of difficulty in dealing with the opposite sex...
...Los Angeles is a wonderful place...
...Having received the rudiments of a classical education through his reading of Plutarch and other ancients assigned to bright schoolchildren in the days of his youth, he took up the values of honor and duty as guideposts for his life...
...An idealistic patriot, he fought because of a sense of American mission and a naive hatred of the Hun: " I do want to be in at the death of this 'Scourge of God.' Just think what he'd do to our great country and our beautiful women if he only could...
...Although his family drew hardly a tenth of the attention given the Roosevelts, he felt that they were subjected to a constant barrage of vilification...
...This new material--as opposed to the enormous body of formal letters, speech drafts, and public opinion mail that heretofore had made up the "Truman Papers"--was frank and revealing...
...This summer, the magnificent city of Los Angeles will host an arts festival to precede and coincide with the Olympic Games...
...He learned early that human nature was mixed and that neither as politician nor as chief diplomat could he expect to function in an environment of moral purity...
...Anyone who doubts his honesty during the Pendergast years need only read the numerous penny-pinching letters he wrote to his wife in the twenties and thirties...
...2Colorado Associated University Press, 1980...
...It is a pretty sure bet that a man who fretted constantly about the cost of eating out and rented his Washington apartment for periods of a few days was not on the take...
...He never forgot a slight, real or imagined...
...He was, typically enough for his time and place, a young rural bigot whose letters abounded with nasty references to bohunks, kikes, and niggers...
...performers who speak and act out their private fantasies...
...The Baptist church, which he joined at the age of 18, gave him an ideal faith, however much he ignored Baptist preachings against alcohol, gambling, and profanity...
...9 send in the coupon --and start expecting __ Canadians: Postal money orders in U.S...
...The changing tone of his correspondence and his determination to make a career for himself as a businessman once he was out on his own again seem to demonstrate that his father's death in 1914 was a liberating experience...
...During the Washington years, they seem to have been separated as often as not on their wedding anniversary, occasionally even at Christmas...
...He wrote in 1944: "From Sunday school d a y s . . , to World War II you are just the same to me--the nicest prettiest girl in the world...
...dollars only...
...seated on the platform behind him listening with rapt atten'A few of these can be found in Off the Record...
...All had remained his personal property until his death and the settlement of his estate...
...Five and a half years after he had left the White House, he took it upon himself to lecture to an Arkansas friend about the need to comply with court-ordered desegregation...
...In this controversial article, Sam Cohen, the inventor of the neutron bomb, proposed making Israel's borders secure by means of a permanent radiation barrier--a hightech version of an electric fence...
...During the upheavals of the 1960s, he seemed to them a reassuring link with the past...
...You can try Reason now at 50 percent off Sign me up f o r a year o f REASON...
...Just | l Please allow six weeks for delivery...
...Little, Brown, $13.50...
...In the end, the times in which we live determine our evaluations of historical figures...
...Last year Reason discovered a rapidly growing industry--private firms that operate airport control towers for half what it costs the usual operator, the federal government...
...He gloried in his provincialism and wanted to be thought of as an ordinary person who exemplified the virtues of American democracy...
...My $12 payment is enclosed...
...After the death of Mrs...
...A child of the late nineteenth century, he accepted and attempted to practice its best values unquestioningly...
...As far as I am concerned, it has the kindest, sweetest, most fun-loving people of any place I have ever lived...
...Peter V. Sampo Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack, NH 03054 Please send me information about this program...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 Truman and the Modern Presidency in particular serves as a vehicle for Ferrell's high opinion of Truman, whom he considers possibly the greatest President since Lincoln...
...promoters say, the event will make Los Angeles the cultural center of the world this summer...
...During the past decade or so, Truman has captured the American imagination less because of what he did than because of a widely held sense that he represented something authentic that is no longer to be found in our national life...
...Charge my credit card...
...An older and considerably more mature Harry Trumanwa man who had experienced wartime combat and had achieved success in politics-emerges in the last third or so of Dear Bess and dominates Off the Record...
...Norton, $19.95...
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...But he also most likely would consider Reagan a renegade too close to those he occasionally characterized as "gluttons of privilege...
...Prone to describe himself as " a little left of center," he was an example of a currently endangered species--a liberal of the Vital Center...
...When Bess agreed to an informal THE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...
...If private operation were extended to small airports alone, taxpayers could save $60 million a year...
...That is no exaggeration...
...In a matter of months, he produced another successful book, Dear Bess: The Let'Harper & Row, 1980...
...and an exhibition of French Impressionists...
...Reading a novel by someone other than, say, Harold Robbins, is thought of as exotic almost beyond understanding...
...Most recently, he has produced Truman: A Centenary Remembrance.' A collection of 200 or so photographs displaying every aspect of HST's life, A Centenary Remembrance is clearly aimed at the coffeetable set...
...as a senator in his fifties looking at the business end of what one hopes was an unloaded six-shooter wielded by John Nance Garner...
...He understood that neither his country nor the world could be made perfect...
...The AS stands f o r American S p e c t a t o r . The month and year immediately following is y o u r exp i r a t i o n d a t e . AS SEP85 IN47401SAKEI"~;IeISK 3901 b I 3 KATH~YN BAKED BLCOMINGTON .! h 47401 We hope this will be helpful and save you some time...
...Even in the Victorian Age, didn't most young men give up after a while and shop around elsewhere...
...He remained a simple man in ways that were both attractive and unattractive...
...Ferrell found himself captivated by the "good stuff" so long denied historians...
...Few working historians would rate HST quite so high, although the majority still seem to accept the "near-great" evaluation of several scholarly polls and agree that Truman's achievements --preserving the New Deal at home, containing Soviet expansion abroad, establishing the framework of the contemporary presidency--were considerable...
...In addition, there are many car washes located quite near to where I live...
...In 1906 at the age of 22, he was a promising young clerk drawing a salary of $100 a month--good money in those days--with a major Kansas City bank...
...In fact, here in Los Angeles a novel means one of those things you find in little chrome racks We have changed o u r mailing label f o r m a t s t a r t i n g with the May 1984 issue...
...One should beware of making assumptions about an individual's character based on letters to a young lady with whom he is hopelessly smitten...
...Vermont's vouchers...
...he saved it from Soviet domination...
...tion is Ronald R. Reagan, second-rank matinee idol, actors' guild activist, liberal Democrat, and Southern California ADA stalwart...
...W.W...
...Half-consciously, they came to realize that he was in magnified form a composite of all of them...
...D Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...There will be 400 performances in all, ranging from Mozart operas to jazz to musical scores of movies to "performance a r t . " All in all, as the Benjamin J. Stein is a writer and producer in Hollywood...
...For instance: _9 The SEC versus the First Amendment...
...Reason's nose for news extends to little-noticed good news, as well...
...He accepted the resignation of Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor when he became President primarily because he was uncomfortable with the idea of a female Cabinet member...
...The weather is perfect, and it is possible for almost anyone to earn a decent living here...
...Was it simply one of the great love stories of our time...
...His position held plenty of possibilities for advancement, and he enjoyed the relatively cosmopolitan life of the city...
...as a would-be energy tycoon at 32 standing in front of an oil derrick...
...He and his young lady occasionally attended Shakespearean performances and classical concerts...
...But none of the glory of the city has to do with high culture...
...one suspects he instinctively grasped their messages o f impersonality and disorder...
...3 Along the way, Ferrell also found time to write HaZy S. Truman and the Modern Presidency," a slim volume aimed primarily at the college classroom market...
...Truman went into retirement as an unpopular, discredited President...
...Ferrell pounced on them like a jungle cat with a sure instinct for his prey...
...An intensely partisan Democrat, he was incapable of giving enthusiastic support to any Republican...
...His predecessor had saved Western Europe from Nazi domination...
...Where would the Reformation have gone if Martin Luther had taken a poll...
...9 Defense rigs the tests...
...Harry Truman was, of course, not simply a human being of unalloyed virtue...
...Relatively open in his contempt for the big publishers, he also harbored an intense distrust of most working reporters and columnists...
...A product of the populistic rural Midwest, he distrusted big labor almost as much as big business...
...I've never thought that God gives a damn about pomp and circumstance, gold crowns, jeweled breast plates and ancestral background," Truman characteristically told himself in 1955...
...He had undertaken an alliance with a notorious political machine but had managed it in such a way as to preserve his self-respect and his reputation for honesty...
...their worship services were simple and unadorned...
...Shortly after Reason blew the whistle, a federal court ruled that the SEC was violating the First Amendment...
...Reading a newspaper here is considered a highly intellectual, almost daringly intellectual act...
...Even as an older and wiser man, he could lapse into such language when angry...
...The accompanying text is thin, apparently hastily written, and most effective when Truman addresses the reader directly via a well-chosen quotation...
...he sought simply to improve them...
...Yet one senses that these are not the reason for a national fascination with Truman so strong that three of Ferrell's collections have become Book-of-the-Month properties...
...Among the several hundred events will be Shakespearean plays performed in Japanese Kabuki style...
...Revisionist historians to the contrary, he really believed in every program he advocated--even national health insurance, even civil rights...
...The Baptists allowed the common man direct access to God...
...He made a virtue of his contempt for public opinion surveys, even as they increasingly became the indispensable tools of more bureaucratic-oriented and manipulative-minded politicians...
...but most of Harry's letters contain references to hacked-out serials in the popular magazines and to light, long-forgotten musicals...
...I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he'd taken a poll in Egypt...
...He believed that a common characteristic of great leaders throughout history was their mastery of their "carnal instincts...
...Above all, he seemed a textbook example of the inner-directed man who somehow managed to survive and triumph in an other-directed era...
...the unexpected in your mailbox, gzsemmmememmeeee---memeeeeeeemmeeJ America's fastest-growing magazine o f ideas THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 27 for nine years after their graduation...
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...They provide many readers with reassuring confirmation that America was once led by men who in contrast to today's crop were more virtuous and, above all, utterly lacking in artificiality...
...Four years later, lightning struck again...
...Between his discharge from the Army at the end of World War I and his swearing-in as President at the end of World War II, Truman had gone through some difficult and complex experiences...
...Two books followed quickly: the immensely successful Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman and the less-noticed The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman, 2 a collection of Truman's reminiscences about his life and career...
...It is for this reason that Robert Ferrell's greatest success has been with those works that simply let Old Harry speak for himself...
...There can be no doubt after reading Dear Bess that the young Truman was a rube, perhaps a bit more educated than the typical Missouri farmer but about as provincial and unsophisticated as they come...
...Date Signature YOUR NAME ADDRESS (Please print) CITY STATE ZIP _ _ I g 1 l l | 1 l l l l ai | the regular price--only $12 a year...
...I wish I could find a way to explain just how marginal to Los Angeles life this entire exercise will be, and how silly in the context of Southern California culture, but I do not think I can, any more than I could imagine typing enough words to fill up the black holes in space...
...So it wasn't surprising that the liberal got tougher treatment by the press...
...A detailed Reason expos6 of conflict of interest in the testing of new weapons led to a "60 Minutes" broadcast and legislation to set up an independent testing office...
...His personality was incompatible with blatant political cynicism...
...P a t r i c k Shanahan S u b s c r i p t i o n Manager THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 29...
...He is" the author of Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism and is currently working on a biography of Harry Truman...
...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS For Catalogue and Brochure Write To: Dr...
...Born to a marginal family in a pseudo-egalitarian 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 environment where social-economic distinctions actually were felt in practice, if not in theory, a failure in business, an associate of crooked politicians, he developed a touchiness about himself and his own brood that verged on the paranoid...
...He always retained within himself a residue of insecurity--about his education, his origins, his commonness...
...One who makes his assessment after observing the administration of Jimmy Carter, the current state of the Democratic party, and the failure of what is today called liberalism may wonder if Truman's country or his party will ever again do as well...
...Visa [] Mastercard Card Number Exp...
...It is disconcerting to read a second-term senator's reference to Brooklyn sportswriters as "Kike trolly dodgers" or a President's description of heavyweight champion Joe Louis as a "yellow nig," however private and casual his remarks may have been...
...AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS I OLYMPIC ART L e t me tell you about high culture in Los Angeles...
...EMINENTOES ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF HARRY TRUMAN F i v e years ago, Robert H. Ferrell, an eminent diplomatic historian at Indiana University, happened to be in the Kansas City area on business...
...But as memories of the controversies with which he was associated faded into the _9 distance, many ordinary Americans found themselves identifying with and admiring him...
...He went off to risk his life in World War I without the slightest understanding of such geopolitical folderol as the mutual Anglo-American interest in control of the Atlantic...
...The pictures are another matter...
...He seized the opportunity to make himself the editor of Harry Truman's own account of his life...
...the typewritten material had been handled and jealously guarded by his long-time confidential secretary...
...An economic journalist surveyed the potential market for weather forecasts and concluded that the taxpayers don't need to keep government in the business of providing weather data...
...His three edited books contain altogether a thousand pages of undiluted Trumaniana...
...Specific customers (airlines, shippers, newspapers, broadcasters) can and should pay for the information they value...
...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as seen through the eyes of the Christian humanist...
...as a 42-year-old Lieutenant Colonel sporting a mustache and a field uniform at reserve camp...
...A historian writing in 1963 after eight years of Eisenhower and two of Kennedy probably would have commented condescendingly that the nation and the Democratic party could have done worse than Truman...
...a German dance theater that will do an adaptation of The Rite (sic) o f Spring, featuring 400 pounds of dried leaves and a stage planted with live grass...
...Bloomington, Indiana b y Alonzo L. Hamby ters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1950-1959...
...One finds himself concluding that Truman climbed to the pinnacle of American politics despite a remarkable lack of support from his wife at times when he desperately needed it...
Vol. 17 • July 1984 • No. 7
