Truman Step by Step

...Hechler's tales about Truman's whistle-stop train trips should be grist for a future historian...

...There is a good deal here about Truman's attitude (outright disdain) toward Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and General Douglas Mac Arthur during the Korean War...

...Probably more important are Hechler's stories of how Presidential policy actually is made and the roles of White House speech writers in formation of policy...

...Our political system, beginning with the Presidency, has adapted to the miracles, but not very well...

...Understandably, Truman with his Nineteenth Century populism couldn't see this, nor have his seven successors...

...This procedure is probably routine in all administrations, but Hechler has gone to great lengths to show the workings of the White House...

...The material miracles are commonplace today— television, computers, nuclear power, lasers, space explorers...

...All this is implied in Ken Hechler's book, Working with Truman, but it is never stated explicitly, and that is both charming and troubling...

...He details step-by-step policy developments through drafts of speeches and through the inevitable jealousies of Presidential aides...

...W I L L I AM STEIF (William Steif is a former national and foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers...

...I wish Hechler had not stood quite so close...

...He is remembered in the House as a bright, wry man who fought hard for liberal causes, even when the odds against him were overwhelming...

...Hechler has produced a volume which some day, for some major historian, will be of inestimable value because of its anecdotes and insights into Truman's character and personality...

...Hechler himself became a West Virginia Democratic member of the House of Representatives for eighteen years before losing his sole try for higher office...

...Hechler shows that the people around a President, any President, have enormous impact...

...He was the last President who had a clear memory of Nineteenth Century America and a vision of what Nineteenth Century populism could mean to the nation...

...if civil rights are less a reality today than home computers, that failure can be traced to the late 1940s...

...But if Working with Truman has a deficiency, that is it...

...There may come a time when the high-tech American society is dated from the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast that Truman sanctioned during his first year in office...

...others dropped out of sight...

...Today, the scandals look like extremely small potatoes...

...his goal was much more modest...

...His anecdotes are delightful, and the "inside baseball" of Truman's White House and political Washington is interesting to anyone who recalls such nearly forgotten personages as J . Howard McGrath, Pat McCarran, and Drew Pearson...

...He has consulted the Truman Library at Independence, Missouri, as well as dozens of his White House colleagues and his own memory and notes to pull together a readable volume which gives a good picture of Truman and the mechanics of Truman's Presidency...

...His Administration formed a kind of bridge from blue-collar America to today's high-tech, post-industrial society...

...There is a kind of disjunction between the high-tech society and democracy's "common touch," and into the void fall millions of our fellow citizens...

...His summation: Truman "never lost the common touch and was determined to use the awesome power of the Presidency to help bring peace and justice to the average people all over the world...

...Obviously Hechler admired Truman greatly...

...Yet the seeds of the miracle society were planted in the Truman era...

...Hechler, a scholar who spent from late 1949 to the end of the Truman Presidency as a White House researcher and speech writer, devotes many pages to the people around Truman and to the press-fueled scandals which plagued his Administration...

...But at the same time his book fails to catch some of the larger changes that were sweeping the American Presidency during Truman's years in office...

...I'm not sure Hechler had to get into all this...

...Some of the people sketched, such as Clark Clifford and Mike Mansfield, became notables on their own...

...That meant he was the last President millions of Americans saw in the flesh on the campaign trail...

...He could have told us how much the Presidency was changing in those years, 1945-1953, when the United States not only emerged from the Great Depression and World War II but also was transforming itself into a sort of miracle society...

...16.95 Harry S. Truman was the last U . S . President to practice pretelevision politics...