Word: trumanity
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...McCain said this: "President Harry Truman once said of America, 'God has created us and brought us to our present position of power and strength for some great purpose.' In his time, that purpose was to contain communism and build the structures of peace and prosperity that could provide a safe passage through the Cold War. Now it is our turn. We face a new set of opportunities and also new dangers ... The United States must lead in the 21st century, just as it did in Truman...
...problems with this word because I find it terribly elusive. As a biographer, I'm tempted to say [temperament] is a distillation of life's experiences that leaves a residue, if you will ... There are Presidents for whom it is very easy to say what their temperament is. Harry Truman is a classic example. Probably Lyndon Johnson would be another example. Ronald Reagan [is another], but there are others for whom I'm not sure it works quite as well...
...lying in the 2000 campaign when he promised a humble foreign policy. He just had no idea what was coming. F.D.R. probably was lying when he promised the anxious parents of 1940 that "your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." Always be sincere, Harry Truman said, even if you don't mean it. The presidency is less an office than a performance: Who saw the gloom and glower behind Eisenhower's incandescent grin? This is why temperament descends easily into caricature: the feisty Give-'Em-Hell Harry, the cool-as-crystal Kennedy, the Vesuvian Lyndon...
Both campaigns have evoked the ghost of Harry S. Truman, a salt-of-the-earth fellow whose honesty and common sense allowed him to govern in Washington without being corrupted. So I began my trip near the leafy street corner in Independence, Mo., where Truman had his home. I strolled the downtown sidewalks along which the former President took his morning constitutional after he returned home from building the postwar world. In a shop near the courthouse, I asked the woman behind the counter what she was thinking about the election. She replied that she was a lifelong Republican...
...place. Forgotten, at least, by the tourists and academics of the stylish sort, whose Adirondack lodges and Urban Institutes largely bypass the dead ends of this nation. It is in forgotten places, however, where there is the most to be remembered. In one conversation, I learned about how Harry Truman was the only good president the country ever had. In another, I learned that the Earth is 6,000 years old. In still another, I learned about the best way to can apple butter...