Harry S. Truman: The American Presidents Series: The 33rd President, 1945-1953

After his party’s blistering defeat in the 1946 election, Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States, decided it was time to stop trying to please everyone. “I think the proper thing to do . . . is to do what I think is right and let them all go to hell.” The result was like being given a get-out-of-jail pass. Truman was free to be himself—honest, plain spoken—to give as good as he got in the political arena. Give ‘em hell, Harry. More importantly, he was free to pursue a course he thought best for the nation, rather than for his political party; free to conduct a presidential campaign that—despite long odds—would see him reelected in a stunning upset; and free to pursue a course that would see him become—despite even longer odds—one of our nation’s greatest presidents. Professor Robert Dallek captures the man and the presidency of Harry S. Truman in a mere 153 pages—brilliantly. Truman was famous for being a man of grit and determination, an everyman who spoke his mind. Dallek reveals yet another dimension—Truman as a man with a lot of heart.You could say Harry Truman was dealt a bad hand upon taking office as president, after the unexpected death of Franklin Roosevelt. Neither FDR nor the White House staff had prepared Truman for what lay in store—suddenly thrust into office as a wartime president. The war in Europe was near an end, while the war with Japan continued unabated with no end in sight. Incredibly, Truman was unaware of the atomic bomb. His first 100 days in office were unlike that of any president before or since. He took office in April, saw Germany surrender in May, met with Churchill and Stalin in Pottsdam in July to discuss postwar arrangements, and in August ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in Japan’s surrender. The decision to drop nuclear bombs was the most controversial decision of his presidency, and is second-guessed to this day. The decision was based on saving lives--as many as 500,000 American soldiers and at least one million Japanese civilian lives--should the U.S. Army have launched a ground assault to force Japan's surrender.Truman’s second year was nearly as fraughtful. Stalin was not about to give up the territory his army occupied, from Poland south to the Balkans, in what Churchill described as an “Iron Curtain” dividing Europe. It was a bad time for Truman, as his biographer David MaCullough has pointed out. “To the press and an increasing proportion of the country, he seemed bewildered and equivocating, incapable of a clear or positive policy toward the Russians.” In the mid-term elections, the Republicans took back both the House and the Senate. Truman was down but not out. “Nobody but a damn fool would have the job (of president) in the first place,” he lamented. “But I’ve got it damn fool or no and have to do as best I can.” The plaque on his desk said it all: The Buck Stops Here.Over the next two years, Truman set a course that would define his presidency, and that of the nation for the next half century. To contain the Russians, he created the Truman Doctrine, a policy of supplying aid to countries resisting Soviet advancements. He urged his secretary of state, George Marshall, to outline a plan—later known as the Marshall Plan—to provide the financing necessary to rebuild Western Europe and prevent further Communist influence there. When the Soviets blocked access to West Berlin he ordered an airdrop of vital food and supplies that enabled the beleaguered city to remain democratic and free until the Soviets reopened access to the West. And when the nations of Western Europe began to recognize the need for a military network of mutual support, he backed the formation of NATO. Indeed, World War III seemed to beckon at every turn, but Truman remained cool, and enacted the Containment Policy to counter Russian encroachment. The result was cold war instead of hot war.Truman faced a mountain of difficulties at home as well, with labor unrest (including a national railroad strike), a shortage of consumer goods, inflation at over 14 percent in 1947, and an economy struggling to regain its footing after the slowdown produced by the end of the war. Truman’s approval rating, sky high at 87 percent when he took office, plummeted to 36 percent in 1948, and it was widely believed that he didn’t stand a chance of beating Republican Thomas Dewey in the election that year. Truman complained bitterly, but the truth was he loved a political fight, and relished beating opponents who had repeatedly underestimated him. He embarked on a relentless whistle-stop campaign that took him from one end of the country to the other and resulted in his narrow victory over Dewey. The Democrats also regained both houses of Congress. Vindicated, an exuberant Truman held up an early edition of the Chicago Tribune that proved the pundits wrong. The headline read: “Dewey Beats Truman.”Truman’s renewed popularity was short-lived. As with nearly all presidents elected to a second term, he would find his job even more difficult (if that were possible) and the political attacks ever more brutal. He began his second term promising a Fair Deal for all Americans, including universal health care, an increase in the minimum wage, increased funding for education, and equal protection under the law for all Americans, regardless of race. Some of this agenda was enacted, taking significant steps to ban racial discrimination in federal hiring, desegregate the military, and raise the minimum wage, but falling short in other goals. When a strike by the steelworkers persuaded Truman to take over the companies involved, he was overruled in the courts. It proved to be one of the biggest blunders of his presidency. When Korea erupted in armed conflict, Truman saw the Communist influence in the North as a threat to the entire region, sending in U.S. troops to stem the tide. When the popular General Douglas MacArthur publicly resisted Truman’s order not to pursue Chinese troops across the 38th Parallel, Truman fired him for disobedience. Later, to his chagrin, he watched as MacArthur was given a hero’s welcome in Congress and a ticker-tape parade down Broadway in Lower Manhattan. For a man of Truman’s pride and sense of decency, it surely was a bitter pill to swallow. By the time he left office, Truman’s popularity had plummeted to a dismal 32 percent.Truman’s star has been on the rise ever since. Today, he is much beloved. Historians currently place him sixth on the short list of great presidents.“The ancient Greeks believed that fate is character,” writes the author. “Truman’s current standing as an up-by-the-bootstraps American whose fortuitous elevation to the presidency and ultimate good sense and honesty in leading the nation through perilous times are a demonstration of how circumstances and human decency can ultimately produce a successful life—and a presidency that resonates as a model of how someone can acquit himself in the highest office.” Amen.

Professor Robert Dallek's HARRY S. TRUMAN is an illuminating and exhilarating read both for those deeply steeped in the Truman story and for those to whom Truman is a little-known figure. Dallek employs politics as the underlying theme that traces both Truman's career and the volatility of an American public that, not infrequently, can swerve far off the course of common sense and of appreciation for the real-world complexities of both domestic change and international vital interests. Dallek's succinct essay provides me valuable insights into the current Tea Party aberration. Biographer Dallek, who has exhibited keen insights into the personalities and politics of FDR, Nixon, JFK, and LBJ, and Reagan, brings similar acumen to assessing Truman-- the man, the politician, and the president. As a teenager, I stayed up late watching the 1948 election in which Truman confounded the professional pollsters. I am familiar with many of the two dozen books upon which Dallek depends for many of his core facts and anecdotes, including McCullough's TRUMAN, Hamby's MAN OF THE PEOPLE: A LIFE OF HARRY S. TRUMAN, George H. Gallup's THE GALLUP POLL, 1935-1971, and Merle Miller's PLAIN SPEAKING: AN ORAL BIOGRAPHY OF HARRY S. TRUMAN. I have taught Truman in a college course for nearly twenty years. I am astonished by how accurately Dallek, in 153 pages, synthesizes many complex events. I feel humbled at how often Dallek provides a succinct factual and political insight that had escaped me in my 60+ years of learning about Truman. Most important, Dallek provides a comprehensive, credible assessment of a man and president who, too frequently, has been misunderstood and, years ago, trivialized. Truman, during his initial decades, seemed a most unlikely person ever to earn a Time cover story, much less the American presidency. His early adult years could be considered a failure, except for his distinguished WW I military service. His love of history, biography, and politics commenced at an early age. His association with Tom Pendergast obliged him to engage in distasteful patronage, while maintaining his personal financial integrity. His improbable ascent from being `Pendergast's boy' in the U. S. Senate to the White House came from his political loyalty, his conscientious work ethic that, among other things, saved the U. S. billions in military contract waste, and from his own personal integrity. As Dallek illustrates, Truman was no saint, except when it came to personal financial scrupulousness and to women--his wife and mother in law seemed as much comfort to him as was Mary to Abraham Lincoln. Truman often felt frustration. At times he confined this to his diary or to letters that he wrote and then never mailed (his strong hatreds included General McArthur and Richard Nixon). On occasion, when he expressed this anger publicly (his letter to the music critique who panned his daughter's singing is a classic example), Truman diminished his stature and effectiveness. From an early age, Truman appreciated the nature of politics. During a troublesome period of his presidency, he wrote his daughter that an effective president needed to be "a liar" and a "double-crosser." [Were these qualities he had learned from observing FDR in action?] What comes through clearly in Dallek's account is Truman's basic decency. Despite his many downs and ups, Truman always had a capacity swiftly to get back on track. He also was a quick learner, as evidenced from how he handled his presidency, after the initial freshman months. Dallek describes several of Truman's core visions. From the outset of his presidency, he sought to rejuvenate the New Deal program. Then, and after the 1948 election, he was stymied both by the mood of the country and by the conservatism of Congress. Several of his boldest moods were a mixture of politics and personal beliefs: the recognition of Israel; his fight against John L. Lewis and his veto of the Taft-Hartley bill, and his Executive Order desegregating the military. Since Gallup Polls commenced in 1935, no president, including Nixon, has so consistently scored as low as Truman during office. Truman departure from the White House in 1953 was lamented by few. In a brief epilogue, Dallek describes why, nearly sixty years later, Truman is ranked among America's near-great presidents. His Cold War actions, in retrospect, are now generally applauded. Especially after Watergate, his personal integrity became warmly applauded. His concerns for the average American were addressed in subsequent legislation, from LBJ and, most recently, Obama. He was faced with some of the most vexing domestic and international problems that ever confronted an American president. Most historians now agree that Harry `The Buck Stops Here' Truman served his country uncommonly well. HARRY S. TRUMAN is part of The American Presidents series, initially edited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and now by Sean Wilentz. So far I have only read one other book in this series: Charles Peters' LYNDON B. JOHNSON, which I also found superb (see my Amazon review).

This short book is a good summary of Harry Truman’s presidency. Dallek is especially strong at showing the tensions and problems Truman faced as president as well as those he caused. The book does not pull punches on Truman’s weaknesses. But most of the problems Truman faced were not his fault – adjusting the U.S. economy after the war, the anti-Communist furor at the time, the situation in post-war Europe, how to deal with what was happening in China and Korea, and many others. For those who did not live through those times, the book is an excellent record of just how incredibly dangerous the late 40’s and early 50’s were. Paranoid Joseph Stalin, the rise of Mao Tse-tung in China, how to deal with the atom and hydrogen bombs, divided Berlin and the Berlin airlift, spying, McCarthy – it seems at times overwhelming. But, as Dallek shows, though Truman was his own worst enemy at times and his lack of experience really showed, he managed as president to keep the national and international chaos from turning into a nuclear war. At a time when almost no one understood what such a war would be like, its occurrence was a real possibility and one of the better things about Harry Truman was that he understood that possibility better than most. It may have been because he had more information about the results of his own decision to drop the bomb on Japan but, whatever the reason, he (mostly) kept his wits about him. This is a readable and engaging book. No matter how one feels about Harry Truman, it chronicles a critical time in American history and is a strong addition to the American Presidents Series.

Here is a man who stood up to the challenge, come hell or high water. I admired him for canning MacArthur, who in my opinion was continually on an ego trip. Truman's 'buck stops here" tells other presidents what they should know but seldom shoe. Although not an American, I wouldn't have minded having Harry in charge if my country.

very informative without being laboriously detailed

Another great book to add to the collection!