Life of a President

Harry Truman.
by Margaret Truman.
Morrow. 602 pp. $10.95.

Praise of famous men should not be assigned to their devoted children—the subject is too close to the camera for true definition. Margaret Truman's memoir of her father is naturally a bit slanted: an only child, she was so overwhelmed by the concentration of parental love as to be blind to even such minor faults as her father, a can-did man, cheerfully acknowledged. Someone, an admirer, once said that Harry Truman was right about large things, wrong about small ones, but his doting daughter wants it all the way, whether she is discussing Hiroshima or the Missouri Waltz. Thus, there is general agreement that Truman retained his independence and his essential honesty even when, early in his career, he was involved with the Pendergast machine, but Miss Truman must have it that there was no involvement at all. The truth of course is that Truman solicited Pendergast's aid, and could not have been elected to the Senate without it. On a lesser plane, she insists that a concert pianist was lost to the world when her father took up politics; Truman himself, though he fiercely defended his daughter's musical talents, was diffident about his own: “I quit taking piano lessons at the age of fourteen,” he told Edward R. Murrow, “because I thought it was sissy.”

It would be foolish then to expect revelation from so devoted a daughter, and a confirmed Democrat at that, and it is not because of its excess of zeal that one may fault Miss Truman's generally lively book; she is telling an all-too-familiar story, one that has already been fully charted by others, notably by Alfred Steinberg in The Man from Missouri. The trouble is not with Margaret but with Harry. More than any world leader before him he practiced open diplomacy. Truman drew no classified curtain around the acts and plans of his administration; he announced his intentions, and then followed them to the letter. He was naively shocked when Stalin—“reminds me of old Pendergast,” he once remarked—broke his word. Indeed, the most ardent revisionists would be hard put to uncover secret documents of his contemporaries, although many have tried, most recently Bert Cochran in Harry Truman and the Crisis Presidency.¹ Though he puts forward no new evidence—in fact he uses the same source material as Miss Truman—Cochran reaches exactly the opposite conclusions. Administering an overdose of antidote, he is as venomously critical of Truman as she is loving and lavish; not only does Cochran attack the notion that Truman was a great President, he will not even allow that he was a good one, or a fair one, or indeed any kind of President at all.

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Truman's private life, like his public one, was an open book, immune to backstairs gossip or the disclosures of disgruntled associates. He could thus afford to be candid. Few politicians have been so concerned with the public welfare and so indifferent to their own. When he left the Senate he was too poor to meet the mortgage on his mother's farm. There were scandals in his administration but none that touched him personally. He was a model husband and father, touchingly loyal to friends—his wartime “buddies” in particular—even to those who did not deserve his loyalty. Yet despite his rather strait-laced rectitude and Puritanical morals, he had a tart and even a wicked tongue; his salty asides made for “copy” as surely as his set speeches or official pronouncements, and this made him the darling of the newspapermen who covered him in the White House, accompanied him on his tireless political campaigning, and pursued him from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to his retirement home on Euclid Avenue in Independence, Missouri.

Truman's very ordinariness, his lack of side, his unabashed wearing, even when he was President of the United States, of the crazy shirts of the archetypical American tourist, his preference for such Middle-American indulgences as hoisting a few with friends or drawing to an inside straight, established his reputation as a colorful “character.” These qualities stood out all the more when set against the somber background of world crisis throughout his Presidency and the awfulness of the decisions he had to make. He was not, however, a man given to agonizing over his decisions, or soul-searching of any kind. In his own words, when he made a decision, he lost no sleep over it, and went on briskly to the next one. Not that he was callous. His decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was based on humanitarian considerations; the estimate given Truman was that the alternative of an invasion of Japan would cost more than a million casualties, Japanese as well as American. He had weighed the other choice—that of dropping a demonstration bomb—but had to abandon it because the military possessed only two of the frightening weapons at that time. And in point of fact, the second bomb had to be dropped before Japan was brought to its knees. This explanation, whether one approves of it or not, will have to stand, for Truman was no Dr. Strangelove, no dreamer of world conquest.

In domestic politics, Truman, the son of an unreconstructed Southern mother, whose influence on him was great, could yet fight for full civil rights for blacks and for integration. He anticipated and thought beyond present-day welfare programs—medicare, social security, full employment and equal opportunity. Born to isolationism, he could pursue such far-reaching visions as Point Four, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the United Nations. President Roosevelt was a hero in the Jewish community, but Truman was a better friend to the Jews. On purely emotional grounds, he pressed for the admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees into Palestine, and recognized the Jewish State of Israel almost immediately after its independence, overriding his own State Department.

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But all this has been said in his lifetime, all that he did was known, and the best source material for history or biography came from Truman himself, for he often spoke, sometimes too freely, about himself and others; his run-ins with Henry Wallace, with James Byrnes, with Roosevelt and Eisenhower, are common knowledge. The obituaries that flooded the columns of newspapers and magazines after his death were of a sameness, and will remain, I think, the judgment of posterity.

What has his daughter to add? For all her assiduous research and digging into his files, no more than gleanings, a few choice tidbits that may have eluded other researchers, or were based on her own intimacy with the subject at home, some personal letters. But at least one of her anecdotes is new and bears retelling. It illustrates the rather bristly relationship between Truman and General Eisenhower (she denies that her father ever entertained the notion of having Eisenhower succeed him on the Democratic ticket). The General had made a left-handed apology for not attending the 1948 Truman inauguration; he had not wanted, he said, to attract attention away from the President. “ ‘You were not here because I did not send for you,’ Truman said sharply. ‘If I had sent for you, you would have come.’ ”

So far as I know, no one, including Miss Truman, has pointed out the close parallel between Truman's career and that of Lyndon Johnson. Each man ascended to the White House through the Senate and Vice Presidency; each was at first adjudged unfit for the high position and then measured up to it; each was of Southern birth and antecedents and yet made notable contributions to the cause of civil rights; each inherited a war he did not initiate and each incurred the wrath of liberals in the course of fighting that war—for a single war-time act, Hiroshima, in the one instance; for the escalation of the war in Vietnam in the other—and thus each man's remarkably good record in the White House came under a shadow. But the American public was kinder to Truman than it was to Johnson. Johnson retired morosely to his ranch in Texas, and was rarely asked for his opinions, and rarely offered them, while Truman continued to be consulted on his retirement, an elder statesman and homespun sage, dogged by reporters, politicians, and celebrity-seekers to the end of his days.

¹ Funk & Wagnalls, 432 pp., $10.00.