On Political Books
Branch, Taylor
Taylor Branch ON POLITICAL BOOKS In Harry Truman, the nation took a man of Andrew Jackson’s colors and flung him into the age of miracles. The only president in this century who never went to...
...Truman spoke and thought of politics as a contest of character, not of ideas or institutions...
...Truman’s ideas and all his principles were old Jacksonian ones for the most part...
...Truman’s minicabinet meetings were clubby affairs, to which the chief justice sometimes was invited...
...Truman asks reporters not to report this drama or otherwise frighten the American people into thinking there is war in Korea or that their president is jumpy...
...Above all, Truman had a healthy respect for forces outside himself...
...Not a single reporter or White House staff person knew where he was...
...No one bordering on the socialist left would be tolerated in America and the segregationist right would be marked for extinction, both sacrified in part to the desire for a bipartisan foreign policy...
...He almost never spoke about them abstractly, but they were implicit in thecolorful ways he described the people and events that impinged on his days...
...His personalismcarried with it an idea of loyalty that, as Donovan details, made Truman more ,tolerant of corruption than even his detractors like to remember him...
...To fill the need for a larger aura, his plainness became magnified into Citizen Truman, the man who could answer questions in one word and fire high-ranking officials in 30 seconds...
...Heseemed to think of boodlingasa matterofpersonal risk, likesexual peccadillos, that was nobody’s official business...
...Gerald Ford had 550...
...Truman originated a centralized national security council system that would become an enormous bureaucracy for all his successors...
...Informed that the navigator has not yet scrambled to the plane, Truman angrily orders it to take off without him...
...capitalistsand labor leaders bloodied each other...
...Historians have come to call him an “underrated” president, a bantam who managed to hold his own against superior forces and better men...
...For many, national politics seemed loo democratic...
...The only president in this century who never went to college became the only one to order the use of atomic bombs...
...The impulse to package things is understandablein retrospect, because so much seemed at risk...
...What should he do about Stalin’s moves to control the government of Poland...
...Less than a month after the rapture of V-E Day, Truman was obliged to send condolences to the relatives of an appalling 45,000 American casualties on Okinawa...
...To many Americans of stature, both haters and lovers of Roosevelt, Truman was a dangerous embarrassment...
...Truman, the last unpackaged president, took steps that led to the packaging not only of future presidents but of the government itself...
...Donovan left Truman in that hotel at the end of his first volume, which covered Truman’s first term in office...
...We see the president, having received first reports of a massive attack by North Korea, rushing to the airport in Kansas City...
...Taylor Branch is a Washington writer and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Those people produced a swirl around Truman, making him a figure of marked transition-the last president to campaign on railroad tracks, the first to have televised coverage of his inauguration-and bombarding ‘him with fateful crises...
...All the reporters comply...
...He demands to know why he is not airborne...
...Nowadays, politicians are obliged to lead with their ideas, which means packaging them, and the result is that they almost never have anything as refreshing as Harry Trumaninside the wrapping paper...
...Conflict and Crisis: 7he Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945-48...
...Politics was a free-for-all in a crowded ring...
...In Truman’s second term, the tumult seems to subside, comparatively, although the jarring mixture of old and new continues...
...The second volume, which covers the second term, 1949-53, is less consistently riveting than the first, perhaps because Truman is less engagingly triumphant...
...He was more of a hireling...
...Ironically, many of his failures grew out of political temptations against which he was supposedly immune, and many of his successes may be attributed to the breadthofhis knowledge...
...What about the demands of Zionists for a Palestinian state, or of French moves to reenter Lebanon...
...On the other hand, many leading economists predicted that the economy would collapse with demobilization or on the orders of John L. Lewis...
...In 1948, the Soviet Union moved to control Czechoslovakia just before the declaration of the nation of Israel, which took place just before the Dixiecrats walked out of the Democratic convention...
...Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1949-53...
...Also, he may have preferred the company of zany crooks to that of the pompous technocrats who were replacing them...
...At the last minute,‘the navigator pulls alongside the taxiing plane in acar and climbs aboard on a rope ladder, like a Hollywood stuntman...
...Should we form the United Nations, build a Marshall Plan, invent a CIA...
...But he made a fool of everyone in the 1948 elections, and in the process he set the course of American politics for the next generation...
...He rattled on expansively, warmly, and accurately for hours about their wives, ailments, and private worries, weighing each one’s character against the elements...
...Americans, overgrown with postwar muscle and overwhelmed by their new role in the world, were looking for someone largerand classier in the White House...
...Americans planned to unite the whole world through the United Nations, but Joe McCarthy convinced them a few years later that their own government was riddled with treason...
...It was charming to think of Huck Finn as the representative American as long as he was drifting along on his own raft somewhere, but it was quite another thing for some semiliterate Missourian to be steering our huge, modern fogcutter...
...Truman-having alienated Democratic liberals by not being FDR and by branding Henry Wallace as too pink (among other deeds) and having enraged the conservative Democrats by proposing the civil rights agenda for the next 20 years-seemed to have thesupport ofno one other than his wife, Bess, and Clark Clifford...
...W. W. Norton, 1977...
...The military services ridiculed each other’s weapons...
...Admiral Radford publicly accused army and air force officers of trying to destroy the navy,and yet he went on to become Eisenhower’s Joint Chiefsof Staff chairman...
...Such isolation of a president now is inconceivable...
...W. W. Norton, 1982...
...He knew why Nathaniel Hawthorne pitied his good friend, Franklin Pierce, and he could describe the dynamic of the literary partnership between Mark Twain and Ulysses Grant...
...This label didn’t do Truman very much good while he was in office, but it has served him well posthumously...
...Like Johnson, hegot rid of the advisers on domestic policy and kept the ones on foreign affairs, but he did much better than either Johnson or Ronald Reagan in using folksy manners to promote flag-raising Americanism overseas...
...Reading Donovan, one can see how, in our constant tinkering with presidential reputations as personified history, we can forget that several billion other people were active in the world...
...And Donovan feels obligated to bog down the reader with a longwinded summary of volume one...
...Yesteryear’s politicians all were alive to him...
...His White House staff never exceeded I3 people...
...The real Truman was more than this, as Robert J. Donovan hasdemonstrated skillfullyin his twovolume biography.* Like Lyndon Johnson, Truman inherited from a hallowed predecessor policies he liked and advisers he detested as cold, pretentious “phonies...
...Truman loved this history for its own sake rather than for his own use, and, unlike Nixon, he seemed open to any lesson from it, not just to the theme of machismo...
...Truman was neither a ruler like FDR nor a hero like Ike...
...MacArthur marched northward through Korea, captivating Truman with glorious dreams ofa unified, noncommunist Korea-only to retreat again under slaughter by the Chinese...
...He erupted in frustrated, vulgar, ungrammatical attacks against Republicans and music critics alike, and took daily command of the Berlin Airlift as well...
...Unlike all his successors to date, he was seldom vague and almost never employed economic buzzwords...
...He played barroom tunes on the piano and presided over the creation of NATO...
...Truman knew American history more intimately than any modern president with the possible exception of Richard Nixon...
...They would like things better when Eisenhower used his blandness and Truman’s national security build-up to conceal these differences under unified management...
...Americans, as Eric Goldman wrote, were so flushed with power and wizardry that they genuinely looked forward to a 20-hour work week and European vacations for the working class...
...The changes have been stark...
...On election night, 1948, Truman sneaked off to a Missouri hotel with three Secret Service agents...
...They wouldn’t today...
...The rush of events-and the colonial sympathies of the responsible American diplomats-was so strong that Truman did not respond to Ho Chi Minh’s letters about the prospects for an independent postwar Vietnam:There, and in Korea, haphazard boundaries popped up along the lines between allies as they accepted Japanese surrender...
...Now, accustomed to the long, slow drift, we forget the rapid fluctuations between giddiness and despair of those years...
Vol. 14 • November 1982 • No. 9
