Truman: The everyman president

The Trials of Harry S Truman:  The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945-1953

Author: Jeffrey Frank

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Price: $32.50 

Pages: 528

In a happier and perhaps more democratic era, the belief prevailed that every American came equipped with such reserves of decency and good sense that each of us could make a pretty darned good president if we had to.

Though on eight occasions a president’s death has abruptly elevated his vice president, the myth of “the accidental president” enshrouds Harry Truman as it does none of the others. Franklin Roosevelt kept Truman in the dark about virtually everything before dying only three months into his fourth term. The new president then faced crises that would have left an ordinary man whimpering — bringing World War II to an end, designing a postwar order and confronting Soviet aggression without triggering World War III. A very crafty fellow, Truman encouraged the idea that he brought nothing more to the job than old-fashioned American horse sense. “I’m a homegrown American farm product,” Jeffrey Frank quotes him telling an audience in his beguiling new biography. “And I’m proud of the breed I represent — the completely unterrified form of America democracy.”

This Frank Capra routine was just true enough to work. Truman never attended college, helped run the family farm and after World War I started an unsuccessful haberdashery. He climbed up Missouri politics thanks to the Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast, barely left a mark during his decade in the United States Senate and proved a perfectly unobjectionable candidate when Roosevelt needed a running mate after he decided to dump Vice President Henry Wallace. Yet as Frank points out, Truman had the native self-confidence that marks out a man as a leader. And he was far more bookish than many of the nation’s better-educated presidents, a student of history who applied, and misapplied, his understanding of the past to the issues of his own time.

Mr Frank does not so much puncture the Truman myth as let out just enough air to settle the man back to earth. Though Truman spent dozens of hours in Joseph Stalin’s company at Potsdam, he misread Stalin almost as egregiously as George W Bush did Vladimir Putin. Truman generally described Stalin as a wily and bighearted incarnation of Mother Russia undermined by the Politburo.

Yet Truman’s tenure coincides with the golden age of American statecraft, when the country embedded its unrivalled power in institutions like the United Nations, NATO and the International Monetary Fund, giving real meaning to the Wilsonian dream of a world governed by law rather than power. Truman signed off on the Marshall Plan, an initiative that is still cited as proof that the United States is an “exceptional” rather than merely self-seeking global power. How to explain the paradox that a figure with virtually no prior international experience presided over the creation of a world order that survives — if just barely — to this day?

Frank’s answer: Truman appointed the right people, though often after hiring the wrong people. He fired the showboat James F Byrnes to make George C Marshall, a revered five-star general, his secretary of state; and then fired the tempestuous Louis Johnson to make room for Marshall at Defence. He appointed the highly dependable Dean Acheson secretary of state after Marshall. Frank emphasises Truman’s deference to both these men; the president appears not to have read in advance, or even known about, the Harvard commencement speech in which Marshall announced the momentous aid programme that rightly bears his name. Frank, a former editor at The New Yorker  (where, almost 30 years ago, he sometimes served as my editor), composes charming and often penetrating sketches of the men around Truman, including the glamorous and deeply troubled defence secretary James Forrestal and Acheson himself, an Anglophile with a lovingly waxed moustache who served for Redbaiters as almost the cartoon version of the “parlor pink.”

What did Truman do? First, he made tough calls when he had to, dropping the atomic bomb, ordering American troops into Korea, canning the demigod Douglas MacArthur. Though his Cold War rhetoric was bellicose, his judgments were generally prudent: When the Soviets imposed a blockade on Berlin in 1948, he refused to shoot his way in, as some of his generals advised; instead, he staged an airlift that prevented American and Soviet troops from confronting each other.

Biographers have a built-in bias toward giving their subject credit for anything within reach; Frank leans almost in the opposite direction. He has very little to say about the Fair Deal, Truman’s domestic agenda. He describes the State of the Union Message that Truman delivered after his miraculous victory in the 1948 election as turgid and routine. The almost complete failure of Fair Deal legislation, and above all of the civil rights package Truman had bravely introduced, would set back liberalism for a generation. How much of that, if any, was Truman’s fault?

Frank’s interests lie elsewhere; and he deserves credit for judiciousness on the tormenting decisions Truman was compelled to make. He ultimately accepts the logic both of Hiroshima and of Korea, though he argues that Truman could have preserved the independence of South Korea without approving MacArthur’s insane decision to cross the 38th parallel in order to take on Chinese as well as North Korean forces. Beyond that, Frank gives us this ebullient, often cantankerous man in full. He quotes the magisterial Walter Lippmann as observing that while it was very easy to get mad at Truman, “neither he nor his critics and opponents were able to keep on being angry. For when he lost his temper it was a good temper that he was losing.”

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