Book Review: Truman

^{Note: This article is reprinted with permission from As I See It, a monthly electronic magazine compiled and edited by Doug Kutilek. AISI is sent free to all who request it by writing to the editor at dkutilek@juno.com.}

McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. 1,117 pp., hardback.
Roman orator Cicero stated, “Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child” (De Oratore II; quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations, selected and edited by H. L. Mencken. New York: Knopf, 1942; p. 536). Hence, the pressing and continuing need to study history in general and for me this book in particular. I was born while three months and three days remained in the presidency of Harry S. Truman (he served April 1945 to January 1953), but I naturally enough remember not a thing about it personally. In fact, I don’t have any recollections of Truman at all until I was eight or ten. My father was wont always to refer to him as “Horrible Harry.”

Truman (1884-1972) was a grandson of pioneer settlers in Missouri and of stock with strongly pro-Southern sympathies. Like most people of that era, he was born and grew up on a farm; he continued to farm into his thirties, when service in World War I took him away from it. On his return, he went into Jackson County, Missouri (location of Kansas City and Independence) politics.

Raised a Baptist and claiming to have read the Bible through twice by age eleven, Truman was nevertheless what some would call a cussin’, whiskey-drinking, poker-playing Baptist. He often had an explosive temper, which was much in conflict with the biblical pattern of personal conduct. McCullough gives only scattered indications that Truman attended church and read the Bible as an adult; whether this is because those activities rarely occurred in that period of his life or were merely an author’s oversight or omission, we cannot say. Even as a politician, Truman did have an apparently justified reputation of being an honest, unbribe-able man.

As a youth with poor eyesight and coke-bottle-thick glasses, Truman was the equivalent of today’s “nerd.” He was a diligent student, especially liking history (he claimed to have read all two thousand books in the Independence public library), and a well-practiced pianist. He was the last U.S. president never to attend college; he did, however, attend night law school in the 1920s though he never graduated. He met his future wife, Bess Wallace, in Sunday school when they were in elementary school. Though they “got serious” in their twenties, he first proposed to her by mail in 1911 and was turned down three weeks later. Though they were engaged in 1913, Truman found himself unable to financially support a wife by farming. They didn’t marry until 1919 when they were in their 30s after Truman’s return from World War I.

After failing as a haberdasher in post-World War I Kansas City, Truman became involved in Jackson County politics as a Democrat. The corrupt Pendergast political machine “ran” things in Kansas City, and the “blessing“ of the Pendergasts was all but essential to political success in Jackson County. Truman became by turns a county “judge” (commissioner or alderman) and in 1934 a U.S. Senator. He was narrowly re-elected in 1940; a hoped-for run at the governorship of Missouri in the interim did not work out. The “taint” of association with the corrupt Kansas City political machine would cling to Truman for years. During the first years of his second term in the senate, Truman chaired an important and increasingly famous committee that investigated government contracts and expenditures for war materiel, exposed hundreds of millions of dollars in waste and fraud, and saved the tax payers multiplied millions of dollars. What national prominence was his was a direct result of his work on this committee.

In 1944, Truman emerged as a “compromise” candidate to serve as Franklin Roosevelt’s third vice president, an office he occupied for just eighty-eight days when Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945 elevated him, ready or not, to the presidency. He had met with Roosevelt only twice since the inauguration and knew absolutely nothing about the atomic bomb project. FDR and Truman were about as different as two men could be. The former was an Eastern, big state, old-money, blue-blooded Ivy Leaguer with a lengthy resume. The latter was a small-town, Midwestern, impoverished farmer-turned-machine politician with no college training.

Truman was immediately faced with a seemingly interminable torrent of events and circumstances that demanded immediate attention. It would be hard to find a period of similar length as the nearly eight years of Truman’s presidency that involved so many developments shaping the course of history. The “hot” war in Europe ended with the defeat of Germany, but the cold war soon began as Soviet imperialism imposed its control over all of occupied Eastern Europe and sought to topple (unsuccessfully) the governments of Greece and Turkey and later South Korea. The Marshall Plan for the economic rebuilding of shattered Europe was a major triumph of the Truman years, as was the Berlin Airlift, which prevented Russian control of all of Berlin and set a precedent of standing firm against Soviet expansionism. The successful NATO alliance that kept the Russian bear at bay—at least in Western Europe—for five decades was created. The United Nations, a hoped-for superior successor to the failed League of Nations, was established (its subsequent record being at best a very mixed bag). A homeland for the Jews was debated, established, and recognized by Truman and the U.S. eleven minutes after it became a reality in 1948; the United States was the first nation to recognize the new Jewish state. Atomic weapons were used justifiably for the first and only time, but their secrets were stolen via Russian espionage. This event was followed by the development of hydrogen bombs and the beginning of their proliferation, resulting in the nuclear standoff between the Soviets and America that continues to this day (lately on a lesser scale than in earlier decades, to be sure).

Russian-sponsored communism was on the march worldwide in China (overthrown by Mao and his hordes in 1949), Korea (1950ff), Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh fighting the French); and also in extensive Russian espionage and subversion within the U.S. government, first exposed in the famous Whitaker Chambers-Alger Hiss case in 1948, followed by the accusations (not entirely unfounded as McCullough suggests) by Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. America’s victorious military was drastically drawn down and all but completely demobilized after World War II, in spite of continued Soviet expansion of their military, resulting in the virtual complete unpreparedness of the U.S. when war erupted in Korea in 1950.

To his credit, Truman was decisive; to his discredit, his decisions were often wrong. Domestically, as a committed “New Dealer,” Truman favored the broad expansion of Roosevelt’s socialist agenda with progressively more government control and interference in the economy and in the lives and decisions of individuals. This push for more state socialism was largely frustrated by Republicans in Congress. He blundered badly when he tried to settle a strike against the steel mills by (illegally, as it turned out) seizing control of all the mills in the country. Ironically, Truman complained when the $600,000 Doubleday paid him for his memoirs was taxed at sixty-seven percent! Expansive government is expensive, and somebody has to pay for it. Why not those who create the growth of this leviathan?

Truman survived the end of his presidency by almost twenty years, much beyond the average. He returned to Independence, Missouri, where he lived out his days and was later interred after his death.

This is the longest of several books by eminent historian David McCullough and the second longest individual book of whatever sort I’ve ever read; one remains to be read. The others, with one exception, have been reviewed in AISI (The Johnstown Flood, 4:10; The Path Between the Seas, 5:11; Brave Companions, 7:10; 1776, 8:7; Mornings on Horseback, 8:11). As with the others, it is meticulous in its attention to detail, demonstrates a broad mastery of the relevant literature and source materials, and is readable. While McCullough is herein sympathetic toward his subject—perhaps at times a bit too sympathetic (certainly more so than I am)—he does not hesitate to present Truman’s faults and failures along with his strengths and successes.

This book might seem overwhelming or intimidating for the average reader to “launch out into the deep” with nearly one thousand pages of narrative, fifty-eight pages of footnotes, and twenty-four pages of bibliography; I spent a full month getting through it. The book, however, provides a great dealt of instruction about the surpassingly important events in the mid-twentieth century, especially in the 1940s and early 1950s, that are intertwined in the life of Harry Truman. May we read and learn and not forever remain mere children in knowledge and understanding.

Doug Kutilek is editor of www.kjvonly.org, a website dedicated to exposing and refuting the many errors of KJVOism, and has been researching and writing about Bible texts and versions for more than 35 years. He has a B.A. in Bible from Baptist Bible College (Springfield, MO), an M.A. in Hebrew Bible from Hebrew Union College (Cincinnati), and a Th.M. in Bible exposition from Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). A professor in several Bible institutes, college, graduate schools, and seminaries, he edits a monthly cyber-journal, As I See It. The father of four grown children and four granddaughters, he and his wife, Naomi, live near Wichita, Kansas.