THE TEST OF TRUMAN
NYE, RUSSEL B.
The Test of Truman Memoirs of Harry S. Truman: years of trial and mope. Doubleday. 594 pp. $5. Reviewed by Russel B. Nye THE second volume of Harry Truman's memoirs covers the years 1946 to...
...Whether he always acted wisely in all situations will be debated for years to come, but in retrospect the objective reader will agree that his batting average is higher than that of a good many others who have occupied the White House in easier and less critical times...
...A President must have a policy...
...II It is the necessity of making decisions, Truman emphasizes again and again, that makes the Presidency the most important and the most demanding job in the world...
...if he is a great President, his policy reflects the wishes and needs of the people and has their support...
...At least twice they involved the tremendous risk of a third world war...
...Soldier-Presidents do not fill the bill, and he quotes approvingly Eisenhower's statement of 1948 that "the necessary and wise subordination of the military to the civil power will be best sustained when life-long professional soldiers abstain from seeking high political office...
...The man who emerges from their pages is an expert politician, a tough-minded, honest, stubborn man, one who never whines, equivocates, indulges in self-pity or second-guessing, one who was always willing to do his job and assume the responsibilities the job entailed...
...It is like riding a tiger, he notes, for a President "has to keep on riding or be swallowed...
...The key to an understanding of Truman's memoirs lies in the recognition of his strong belief that the public needs to know and must know, now and in the future, what was in the mind of a Chief Executive when he made a certain decision and why he made it...
...He is almost painfully mild in his consideration of the Republican leaders who made Acheson's life miserable, though he has some bitter remarks to make about the use of foreign policy as a political football...
...His account of these years is a clear illustration of the man growing to fill the office...
...Tremendous stamina, bolstered by an ability to act, and having once acted refusing to doubt or ponder, carried him through a succession of crises that might well have broken or immobilized a more introspective and less confident man...
...Truman is well aware of this...
...While expressing moderate respect for Adlai Stevenson's campaign of 1952, Truman nevertheless felt that it bore out what he had long thought about the necessity of practical political experience as a qualification for candidacy and office...
...Truman always had, as he carefully points out, the aid of efficient and trusted advisers, but the decisions were his and only his...
...The long section on l'affaire MacArthur is carefully written, deliberately temperate, and fully documented...
...After reading these memoirs, few can have anything but sympathy for the man in the White House during those trying years...
...Eisenhower, for whom Truman has great personal liking and respect as a soldier, fares less well as a politician...
...Beyond his story of events as they unfolded in the years 1946-52, the most interesting reading in the volume lies in Truman's scattered remarks on the nature of the Presidency...
...The job tests the fiber of a man, and Harry Truman, whatever one's party preferences, most assuredly was tough-fibered...
...A President must be a leader, and only he can lead—"There can be only one voice in stating the position of the country . . ." No one can speak for him, no one can make his decisions for him, or the function of the office is destroyed...
...In this way the reader may follow the problems from inception to solution without losing the pattern of events...
...By 1948 Truman knew where he was going, had a program of his own, and possessed complete confidence in his ability to meet the challenges of the office he had fallen heir to...
...Instead of following the chronological organization of the first volume, Truman in the second presents the major problems of his Administration in separate chapters...
...The first impression that strikes the reader is that few Presidents have ever faced so many important problems in so brief a time, or have found it necessary to make so many major decisions so quickly...
...How much is lost to us," he remarks in his preface, "because so few Presidents have told their own stories," for it is only by understanding what a President must do, and how he must do it, that the democratic process can be fully comprehended by the citizens who elect him...
...As in the first volume, the author is principally concerned with setting straight, for history, the record of his Administration and with explaining the problems of Presidential decision...
...More than once he remarks of the gigantic pressures brought to bear on the Chief Executive, and the utter loneliness of a President on the eve of great decisions...
...The third major segment of the book deals with European and Near Eastern affairs, Israel, Turkey, Greece, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift, the increasing tension of United States-Soviet conflicts...
...The Truman of 1948 is a quite different man from the Truman of 1945...
...The attention of the public will naturally be focused in this volume on Truman's account of the stormy clashes with prominent personalities that dotted his Administration with minor explosions...
...Considering the fact that Truman for six years faced some of the most bitterly partisan attacks in political history, he has reason to write much less temperately than he does, a temptation he wisely avoided...
...The Korean War receives the most thorough and lengthy treatment in the volume, which closes with Truman's accounts of the 1948 and 1952 campaign and interim political developments...
...It is quite likely that we shall have in ten years a more thorough knowledge of Truman's Administration than we had of Wilson's in twenty or Jackson's in fifty...
...No one can deny that Harry Truman was a strong President, or that he will have an important place in our history...
...If the people elect a President and bestow on him "a responsibility so personal as to be without parallel," Truman believes the people have the right to know how that responsibility is discharged...
...These are followed by the China question, Marshall's mission, troubles with Chiang, and the swift development of the whole bundle of problems in the Far East...
...Truman's sense of history, always a primary characteristic of his concept of politics and government, threads its way through this volume, providing a continuity which binds it closely to its predecessor...
...At least a half-dozen times they involved issues that could affect the course of domestic policy for generations to come...
...A President must be a politician, in the higher sense of the word, for government is simply applied politics and it takes political experience and understanding properly to run it...
...McCarthy gets off lightly with surprisingly little mention...
...Truman is one of the very few ex-Presidents to tell his story in his own lifetime, while events are still fresh in the memory and the majority of participants in them are still alive...
...Taft, with whom he had a series of brushes after 1946, is treated with respect if not with complete understanding...
...Comparing it to the General's rebuttal, one finds Truman's account by far the more plausible of the two...
...For the most part, Truman's famed temper is kept well under wraps, though obviously he feels more than he says...
...The early chapters of the book deal with the immediate issues of the postwar period—atomic energy, price controls, unification of the military, Taft-Hartley, and so on...
...But Truman is no man to avoid an argument, and if his memoirs are to have value in providing an understanding of those problems that he faced and that still face the nation, he is correct in getting them before the public as expeditiously as he has...
...He quotes Sam Rayburn on Eisenhower—"Good man but wrong business"—and lets it go at that...
...In total effect, Truman's two volumes of memoirs are interesting, readable, and significant books...
...Political amateurs, however well-intentioned, do not fill the bill either...
...Reviewed by Russel B. Nye THE second volume of Harry Truman's memoirs covers the years 1946 to 1952, closing with the Republican victory of the latter year and his departure from the White House...
...As it is, they provide valuable source materials for the chronicles of our time, and will have the effect, applauded by historians, of drawing out other memoirs in reply or rebuttal—as the recent MacArthur-Truman joust illustrates...
...Disappointed at Eisenhower's willingness to lend himself to "a campaign of distortion and vilification" and at his malleability in the hands of professional politicians, Truman records that he parted company with the General after his omission of Marshall's name from his Milwaukee speech (at McCarthy's request) and after his "I shall go to Korea" speech in Detroit...
...He must have realized that the publication of his memoirs would cause violent controversy (as they have) and that his own retirement would have been much more peaceful without it...
Vol. 20 • April 1956 • No. 4
