Word: truman
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...might say that about H.S.T. himself. Historian Richard Freeland, in The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism, argues that "the practices of McCarthyism were Truman's practices in cruder hands, just as the language of McCarthyism was Truman's language in less well-meaning voices." Charles Mee's recent Meeting at Potsdam portrays a vulpine Truman cynically deciding to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima to frighten the Soviets rather than to vanquish an already prostrate enemy...
...tone if not in specifics, these adverse judgments reflect the view of Truman's contemporary enemies, who considered him a clay idol with human feet. The now beloved Missouri Democrat had the dubious distinction of scoring the lowest Gallup popular-approval rating (23%) ever 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...
...Truman was a common man who became the nation's Chief Executive-like Ford, by accident-at an uncommon time. The early postwar years marked the apex of America's political influence and prestige. Communism was a cold war threat, but the Soviet Union lagged far, far behind America as a military power. In short, no U.S. President before Truman or after him had such capacity to shape the course of history...
...typical that he called his Administration the Fair Deal. Not Great. Not Big. Just Fair.) Without that extraordinary scheme for giving, the Marshall Plan, Western Europe might never have survived as a community of free, capitalist democracies. A case could be made that the civil rights movement began with Truman's tough, ten-point message to Congress in 1948, which created the Federal Fair Employment Practices Committee. It also created the Dixiecrat movement, which cost him the 39 electoral votes of four Southern states in that year's election...
...bromide of American politics that Presidents "grow" in office. But some have actually shrunk in the job, and most have remained depressingly the same in character and ability. Truman was one of the few who demonstrated a capacity to change with the demands of his epoch. It is that capacity that underlies the wistful longings of Trumania...