Word: pendergastlies
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...accorded a President-lower even than Nixon's 24%. In fact, Harry Truman's entire career was riddled with paradox and contradiction. Although he was so scrupulous that even in the White House he used his own stamps on personal letters, Truman was the product of Boss Pendergast's corrupt Kansas City machine. His senatorial career, distinguished by wartime investigations of defense production, was nearly ended by Franklin D. Roosevelt's lack of confidence. F.D.R., who thought the Missouri Senator could not be reelected, tried to persuade Truman to retire. He refused, won another term...
Truman's approach to world diplomacy remained pure Kansas City. He found Stalin the Soviet dictator "as near like Tom Pendergast as any man I know." (Pendergast was the boss of Democratic politics in Missouri for almost 30 years.) Truman's intentions, according to Mee, were to thwart the Russians in Europe by stalling off a German peace treaty and keeping the Soviet Union out of the Japanese war till the bomb could clinch it for the U.S. He largely accomplished both aims, but neither was much in keeping with the visions of postwar harmony that much...
...Jackson County, the county judges are the chief elected executives, and are concerned with roads, hospitals and political patronage. Truman held the job of judge and later presiding judge for ten of the next twelve years. In 1934, at the age of 50, with the help of Pendergast's machine, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. They called him "the Senator from Pendergast...
...snide remark was unfair. Truman frequently got advice from Pendergast, all right, but just as frequently he disregarded it. Even F.D.R. thought Truman was in Pendergast's pocket; he asked the Missouri boss to get Truman's vote for Alben Barkley as Senate Majority Leader. Truman voted for Pat Harrison, observing: "They better learn downtown right now that no Tom Pendergast or anybody else tells Senator Truman how to vote." Re-elected to the Senate in 1940, he soon launched the Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program-the Truman Committee-which was to help carry...
Truman's relations with Franklin Roosevelt were always ambivalent. Though F.D.R. would later select Truman as his Vice President, in 1940, Margaret reveals, he tried to dump Truman from the U.S. Senate. Harry resisted and defended his relationship to Kansas City's Pendergast machine...