'Directly from the People'

...Any successor to the towering figure of FDR would have appeared small...

...The only factor concerning Truman's nomination that is merely touched upon, rather than explored definitively, is the role of FDR's deteriorating health...

...McCullough concludes: "[Truman] was the kind of President the Founding Fathers had in mind for the country...

...He manages to evoke his subject even when not directly quoting him...

...Whether deciding to use the atomic bomb on Japan or fighting the virus of McCarthyism, Truman neither acted impulsively nor ruminated excessively...

...For those who are old enough to remember that thriller, it is uniquely revivified...

...For instance, while portraying the former President's years of "retirement" at the Truman Library in Independence, where he put himself on duty six days a week, McCullough writes: "He was always on the job early...

...Yet it was tempered, too, by a ready awareness that not all the victories of leadership occur on the battlefield...

...It is not the courage of these decisions that will live, but the integrity of the man...

...Truman, McCullough shows, struggled all of his early life...

...for readers new to the events, it may be surprising to discover that national politics, besides serving its traditional function of entertaining the country, can seem genuinely consequential...

...He had poor vision???flat eyeballs," he used to say...

...The author brings to his work the deftness he demonstrated in his unforgettable account of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and in his lustrous study of young Theodore Roosevelt, Mornings on Horseback...

...They apply to Truman's entire tenure in the White House, and especially to the telling mo-ment in 1950 when the United States undertook the "police action" in Korea...

...Some mornings, at his desk before the staff arrived, he would answer the phone himself, telling callers what the library hours were, or in reply to further questions, saying he knew because it was his library...

...He also told me that as a boy he had owned a cardboard "wheel" that gave a single fact about each President...

...Throughout Truman, the author's tone is on target...

...the stock investments he made as a young man went bad...

...The point is not meant to deflate Truman's reputation (as if that were possible in a book review...

...He's only Coolidge with eyeglasses...

...and, when he sought it, the unassailable advice of the distinguished American generals and admirals of World War II...

...In fact, it is perfectly clear that his military career was his most formative experience in terms of preparation for a public role...

...Still, McCullough presents chapter after chapter of richly-textured narratives that illuminate the major episodes in the Truman Presidency...

...It provides a lesson in the intricacies of top-level politics and at the same time brings to the surface the deviousness and plain arrogance of Franklin Roosevelt...

...Ever since I learned that," he added, "I avoided doing the same thing...

...What the Secretary's comment does not reflect is the combative spirit that endeared Truman to the American people, who saw in him a David Fighting the nation's Goliaths: big labor, big business and the moguls of the Republican Party...

...his family was constantly anxious about making ends meet, and occasionally didn't...

...Some significant part of every Presidential action is simply beyond divining...

...Such uncommon advantages can carry an Administration a long way...

...From this source, he said, he found out that John Quincy Adams had damaged his eyes by rubbing them toward his nose...

...But before long he was cast down again, this time by the failure of his haberdashery shop...

...He reacted jauntily: "Good...

...senior fellow, Freedom Forum and Media Studies Center Harry S. Truman lives in American history as the very model of what a President ought to be: a feisty gamecock of a Chief Executive who brooks no nonsense from anyone who says him nay...

...recognition of Israel...

...as a child he was so weak from the effects of diphtheria he had to be wheeled around in a carriage for months...

...He never forgot his favorite book from childhood, acollec-tion of fascicles entitled Great Men and Famous Women from Nebuchadnezzar to Sarah Bernhardt...

...The off-hand remark is worth pondering carefully, particularly these days when the public appears to be redefining what it seeks in a leader...

...The Army is where he developed the ability to take charge without being pompous...

...When I explained my quest to a policeman stationed at the House Office Building, he responded: "Why would you want to listen to Truman...

...No doubt the same opinion, perhaps in less elegant form, was being expressed all over the country...

...Following his World War I service in France, where he saw heavy action as the captain of Battery D, he realized that he could be a leader...

...Truman, however, capitalized on an incomparable opportunity to win a place among the nation's outstanding Presidents...

...He was "a more typical American than Roosevelt," Admiral Ernest King once said...

...I propose: "He had that rare kind of mind that might have been ruined by a college education.' No review of McCullough's book can do full justice to the sensitivity and thoroughness he displays in describing the climb of an essentially humble man to the apex of the political pyramid...

...Usually lost in the admiring salutes is the fart that he had the leverage of three important assets: the largest Navy in the world...

...One of the best segments deals with the U.S...

...In addition, his mind was molded substantially by reading biographies of mighty captains of the past...

...That was not his image when he entered the Oval Office...

...What fact would one want to place after Truman's name in an updated Presidents wheel...

...Indeed, they make tangible President John F. Kennedy's observation that in judging a Chief Executive, one must know "what he had going for him...

...and his pursuit of Bess Wallace, his longtime sweetheart, was often discouraging...

...As a soldier in 1945, I recall, I tried to get a ticket to hear in person his address to a joint session of Congress on the day following Franklin D. Roosevelt's interment...

...He was America...

...After years of researching the Truman record he has earned the right to sing his man's praises...

...Allowing for the rare use of hyperbole in Truman, it is easy to label the judgment as fundamentally sound...

...McCullough has powerful influences to sort out: the anti-Semitism and alleged anti-Semitism of a number of Truman's principal advisers, the President's personal irritation with over-zealous Zionists, his close relationship to his former business partner, Eddie Jacobson, and most important, the inability of Secretary of State George C. Marshall to prevail on the issue against the forceful persuasiveness of Clark Clifford, Truman's legal counsel...

...McCullough's story of the 1948 campaign is a special treat...

...exclusive possession of the atomic bomb...

...In this massive but magnificent biography, David McCullough spells out in exquisite detail how an ordinary-looking former road commissioner from Missouri became a great President...

...Every student ought to read it...

...Instead, he resolved problems by instinctively joining his common sense and his understanding of history...

...the latter being a wonderful tool that, regrettably, has fallen into disuse...

...Many years ago, when Truman gave a lecture at Columbia University, I had occasion to tell him that a copy of his beloved book could be found in the campus library...

...His account of Truman's selection as Vice President, a post the Missouri Senator actually desired despite his insisting otherwise, is the fullest treatment to date...

...I mention it merely to note another example of the often marvelous serendipity of history...

...Honest, diligent and eager to be liked, Truman received much encouragement from his old war buddies once he decided on politics as a profession...

...But it should be noted that understanding the relationship between a policymaker's physical or mental condition and the decisions he or she has made will forever remain guesswork...

...It was this spirit that enabled him to hold on to the Presidency...

...From such simple sentences Harry Truman emerges full-blown...

...The Founding Fathers, of course, had George Washington in mind as the ideal President...

...Marshall's words make an appropriate, if incomplete, epitaph...

...He came directly from the people...

...Although Marshall ultimately lost the argument, in its midst he spoke of the President with words of praise he rarely accorded those he saw every day: "The full stature of this man will only be proven by history, but I want to say here and now that there has never been a decision made under this man's Administration, affecting policies beyond our shores, that has not been in the best interest of this country...

...and he does so without patronizing or fawning...