A Political Man Through and Through

...Above all, the exclusive possession of the atomic bomb gave his words a force and a cachet that no President's pronouncements had previously enjoyed...

...Moskin offers no new interpretations while retelling the stirring story of how luck magically called forth the right man at the right moment...

...My recollection is that his phrase was "French wine without alcohol...

...Americans longing for a corresponding convergence of public energy and attention today must know we are a different people...

...Nonetheless, the tone of the later Truman must be regarded as having been superimposed on the contemporary record...

...Yet the gamecock feistiness that the public associates with him was not there full-blown at the beginning...

...Be that as it may, Truman is more than ever an American icon: Born into poverty, plain-spoken, unspoiled by a college education, little given to pretense, he is seen as having been at ease with himself and the chaotic world that FDR bequeathed to him...

...He knew better than that, but he intuited and expressed the public'swill...

...Even giving life to well-laid plans requires a great deal of shimming as well as immense imaginativeness, and Truman was equal to the job...

...And the Truman of 1959 is the one that lives in the mind's eye of most people...

...Similarly, Independence received over twice the number of oral inquiries made at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Boston...

...In those days the Presidential habit of appointing task forces to vet proposed actions was not yet fully formed...

...To be sure, by the time that party took place Truman and Stalin were already like the proverbial two scorpions in a bottle...

...Seated to his host's right, Truman noticed "Stalin was drinking a lot...

...Moskin, who witnessed the period he writes about and participated in some of its high points, is too shrewd a judge of public affairs not to recognize that Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb was a felt response to what the American public would ardently have desired, had it been in a position to know in advance...

...In this connection, let me cite some lively comments Truman made while gracing a meeting of my Seminar on the Presidency at Columbia University in 1959...

...Mos-kin's book offers readers wide learning and immense comfort...

...Niebuhr was being introduced casually to the former President as a man "who also comes from the Ozarks...

...Went forme in '48...

...So now he reveled in being Peck's bad boy, saying mischievous things to his interviewers—and unconsciously shaping his historical persona...

...But he did not have to dwell on that...

...In almost every chapter, though, we are reminded again of what Truman meant when he said, "To be President of the United States is to be lonely, very lonely at times of great decisions...

...I saw him in action during an impromptu exchange he had in 1960 with Reinhold Niebuhr, the distinguished Protestant theologian...

...Asked by an undergraduate for a word on his estimate of Stalin, Truman responded without hesitation that the Soviet leader "was always talking through his hat...

...His had been what an early biographer called a "triumphant succession" to Roosevelt...

...Last year, according to the count of the National Archives, 1,233 researchers used the facilities of the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, compared with 600 diggers at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York...

...Historians and journalists, too, seem to find him the President of choice...

...It might be argued that being a man of the people he was vox pop incarnate and did not need to consult anybody except himself...

...He didn't mean what he said...

...Wright City, Missouri," replied Niebuhr...

...Truman's War is a picture of a man both intimidated and simply awed by the tasks before him, who worked to compensate for his limited experience...

...Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University...

...Moskin shows, however, that the President's responses to Stalin were generally measured and conciliatory, although never fawning...

...That Truman held these high cards should not detract from our appreciation of what the man himself brought to the table...

...A brief paragraph in his last chapter ponders what our era would have been like if Stalin had truly been confronted before the world became conclusively divided, if de Gaulle had not been permitted to return to Indochina, if the atomic bomb had not been dropped, and if the Allies had seized Berlin and Prague...

...As Moskin notes, Truman had not told Stalin that the United States knew?from reading the enciphered Japanese messages its cryptanalysts had broken?that Japan was seeking Soviet help in getting out of the War...

...In addition, he incorporates the substance of countless conversations and interviews he had with surviving participants in or eyewitnesses to those heady days in 1945...

...Truman chose to travel by ship to the Potsdam Conference in 1945, for instance, so that General George C. Marshall and others could at leisure stuff him on the issues certain to arise in the meetings with Churchill (and before the sessions were concluded, with Clement Attlee) and Stalin...

...He went on to tell of a party Stalin gave in his honor at Potsdam...

...Truman's War, and that the mopping up of the battle against Germany and Japan followed a course FDR prefigured down to the insistence on unconditional surrender that had become the slogan of the Roosevelt-Churchill partnership...

...Still, Moskin does not slavishly salute each of Truman's judgments...

...Furthermore, when he made a decision he was never visibly tormented by second thoughts, or by the second-guessers...

...But his chronological narrative of the remarkable events that occurred during Truman's initial five months in office is crisp and lucid...

...Now all of our Presidents must be nimble, changeable, always aiming to catch each new wave of opinion at its flood...

...Many people may quibble with the book's title, contending that the Cold War is the conflict that ought to be known as Mr...

...Truman's Age opened with the nation locked like a laser beam on its objective —completing the enemy's destruction...

...Where're you from...

...He was home free...

...Truman's decisiveness on such issues was nevertheless the single most impressive characteristic of his labors, as the book clearly demonstrates...

...asked Truman...

...from a glass that held about a thimbleful...

...We will never have Truman redux, but the idea of having him will survive...

...Truman s War with a renewed sense of how it once was when mankind had a second chance to reorder international relations and make lasting peace among the nations...

...A battle-tested World War I artilleryman, Truman maintained ever after that the atomic bomb was merely another piece of artillery...

...the laser beam has been replaced by a kaleidoscope that constantly renders new patterns of societal purpose...

...General readers will be grateful to the author for ably and succinctly distilling the vast English-language secondary literature on the way World War II ended...

...editor, "The Presidents: A Reference History " THERE IS no question that for the general public Harry S. Truman is the poster boy President...

...What emerges in Mr...

...It seems to have developed as the years passed, especially during his post-presidency...

...Truman's) and not been able to finish it victoriously...

...The visit is reported in Truman Speaks, published by Columbia University Press...

...The travails of the immediate postwar were over...

...Said the President without drawing a second breath, "Great little town...

...He had taken the country into the Korean War (another war that may be regarded as Mr...

...Of course, the unfolding drama is almost entirely military and diplomatic and the President had a veritable free hand...

...Stalin, meanwhile, had not let on to the President that thanks to Soviet espionage in the U.S...

...No doubt David McCullough's magnificent 1992 bestseller, Truman, has helped to stimulate this interest...

...Truman said his immediate conclusion was that you can't trust someone who is not drinking what he appears to be drinking...

...But the unavoidable truth is that Truman presided over an America at the zenith of its physical and moral power, whose landscape was unscarred by the devastation wreaked on every other major country, and whose victorious generals and admirals were able to ratify with their impeccable credentials whatever course of action he chose...

...he knew the American nuclear weapons program was about to pay off...

...Truman was often as much without a road map as George Washington had been when he became the first President...

...I became curious about just what he was drinking, and I said, T want to try your vodka,' and I poured some into my glass and do you know, it was French table wine...

...Presidents were supposed to make policy quickly, and to make their way by the seat of their pants...

...They will come away from Mr...

...J. Robert Moskin, an award-winning veteran journalist, reviews once more the sudden jump Truman made from accomplished yet relatively unknown Missouri Senator to leader of a Free World beset by problems no Chief Executive had ever faced...

...Even in informal settings he remained a political man through and through...

...Some of that longing surfaces in this book...

...To pine for a new Truman is like aching for a return to the forest primeval...