Harry S. Truman
Ferrell, Robert H.
When Harry Truman left the White House in January 1953, he did it kicking, snarling, and, by his own account, in a petty argument with his successor over why the latter hadn't attended Truman's...
...I go for the lying...
...Indeed, much of the thirty-third president's late-life bile might be explained by his having had the bad luck to both succeed and be succeeded by two of the most popular presidents in modem history...
...That being said, there is still the 1948 presidential election to explain...
...This is Truman Revised, a history based on the forgiving premise that for all his faults, Harry Truman was on-target when making the big decisions...
...The stuff of political legend, it has since served as an inspiration for underdog candidates of both major parties...
...Gerald Ford tried to re-invent himself as Harry Truman in 1976...
...Ickes wrote an open letter in the spring of 1948, advising Truman to retire gracefully or face the prospect of "being driven out of office by a disillusioned and indignant citizenry...
...But given the caliber of White House leadership in recent years, even an ordinary Harry, for all his self-educated, non-Oxford shortcomings, looks good...
...Truman, as his bilious conversations with Merle Miller revealed, was a notorious prevaricator when talking about contemporaries whose popularity dwarfed his own...
...Another, Martha Taft, the sharp-tongued wife of Ohio Senator Robert Taft, coined the killer line, "To err is Truman...
...But as Ferrell informs us, the truth of the matter was that Eisenhower had attended the 1949 inaugural...
...Fulbright, after the Democrats lost Congress in 1946, thought it would be best for the country if Truman, in parliamentary fashion, were to step down and let a Republican take charge (to which suggestion Truman, in a famous rejoinder, termed the Arkansan "an overeducated Oxford SOB...
...won...
...As Ferrell tells us: Truman's popularity with his fellow Americans stood high only until the end of World War II in Europe and Asia...
...So what are we to believe...
...Either that Ike, in the excitement of the moment, suffered a memory lapse...
...The election miracle of '48 was Truman's major achievement as president, though Ferrell is among those biographers, like David McCullough, who see Ordinary Harry in larger terms, as a man who grew in office while shaping America's role as a world power...
...Mostly people looked at him in boredom, taking him at his word when he said he was an ordinary man who happened to be president...
...Boring and ordinary were, for Truman, terms of popular endearment...
...George Bush, another incumbent down in the polls, did the same in 1992...
...Gluttons of Privilege...
...to which Truman said he snapped, "Ike, you'd have come if I'd ordered you, don't worry about that...
...Jimmy Roosevelt publicly endorsed Eisenhower for the Democratic presidential nomination...
...Both failed because, among other things, they lacked their role-model's instinct for the political jugular...
...the other was at the outset of the Korean War, when national unity gathered behind him and his measures...
...Professor Ferrell, Truman's most devoted biographer, is being kind...
...A great president he wasn't (McCullough and other sentimental revisionists to the contrary...
...One was in 1948, when he fought for his political life and Victor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent...
...Except for a couple of brief honeymoons, he had few good polling days...
...Fellow Democrats like Harold Ickes (father of the Clinton staffer), James Roosevelt (son of FDR), and Senator J. William Fulbright (Bill Clinton's sponsor-mentor) were no less unkind...
...When Harry Truman left the White House in January 1953, he did it kicking, snarling, and, by his own account, in a petty argument with his successor over why the latter hadn't attended Truman's inaugural four years before...
...As Robert H. Ferrell tells it, Truman's story was that while he and Dwight Eisenhower were riding down Pennsylvania Avenue, Ike said that he hadn't attended Truman's swearing-in for fear of upstaging the President...
...Truman," Ferrell concludes, "was a very special chief executive," indeed "one of the best choices fate could have provided when, in April, 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt passed on...
...A valid point, as far as it goes...
...When Truman started to take an opponent apart, writes Ferrell, "he liked to leave nothing but the feathers...
...or that Truman was simply reinterpreting history, i.e., lying...
...By and large, depending on time and place, he was looked upon during his presidential years as crude, dictatorial, and in over his head...
...As for placing responsibility for congressional inaction on the Republicans, [Truman] did so with a vengeance...
...And oh, for a boring First Lady like Bess again...
...The initials GOP, he said, stood for...
...The story is one that even Truman in his bilious dotage had no need to embellish...
...How did a boring, ordinary incumbent pull off what Ferrell rightly calls "the biggest political upset in American history...
...Considering that Roosevelt's first choice for vice president in 1944 was the partylining Henry Wallace-mercifully rejected by Democratic party bosses-the country could have fared worse than Harry Truman in the White House during the critical early years of the Cold War...
...But unlike McCullough, Ferrell pulls no punches in detailing his subject's flaws, notably the mean spirit and petty partisanship that often marked Truman's thinking about people and issues...
...0 ne of Truman's sworn enemies, United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis, called him a duplicitous ignoramus...
...after that it began to go down and it stayed down until the end of his term with two notable ups...
...The Republicans wanted two families in every garage...
...Q HARRY S. TRUMAN: A LIFE Robert H. Ferrell University of Missouri Press / 501 pages / $29.95 reviewed by VICTOR GOLD 67 The American Spectator March 1995...
Vol. 28 • March 1995 • No. 3
