Word: trumanism
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BOOKS David McCullough's Truman is rich and sweeping...
...TITLE: TRUMAN...
...knows," a young Harry Truman wrote to his future wife Bess, "maybe I'll be like Cincinnatus and be elected constable someday." The ideal of the noble citizen reluctantly laying down his plow to spend a few years cleaning up his government is deeply appealing to most Americans, especially now during this open season on professional politicians. Such sentiments account for the burst of enthusiasm greeting Ross Perot and for the best-sellerdom that inevitably awaits David McCullough's loving and richly detailed megabiography of Truman...
...search for historic analogies to the Perot phenomenon, Truman's name is often cited, sometimes by Perot himself. On the surface, the comparison makes sense. Both men were feisty bantams, unvarnished, blunt and unplagued by the shadows that afflict the excessively reflective. But there is, in fact, a fundamental difference: unlike the computocratic uncandidate, Harry Truman was an unabashed politician, one who relished all the trappings, from honest patronage to whistle-stop campaigning. A doggedly unsuccessful dirt farmer and failed haberdasher, he entered politics out of need for a job and rose from the county courthouse to the Senate clubhouse...
...Indeed, Truman represented one of the last great triumphs of old-fashioned politics, and McCullough's tome serves as a reminder of how well the system worked in the bad old days before reformers blessed the nation with openness and primaries. In one of the most vivid of this book's procession of vivid tales, McCullough recounts how the Democratic bosses and party elders -- led by Ed Flynn of the Bronx -- concluded in 1944 that Franklin Roosevelt was unlikely to survive another term and that the overly progressive Henry Wallace had to be dumped from the ticket. In the proverbial...