Word: trumans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Harry S Truman...
...some 25 years after leaving office and 2½ years after his death, Harry Truman has assumed the dimensions of a folk hero. Truman buttons bring up to $150 at antique stores. The Truman Library in Independence, Mo., is thronged with visitors. Plain Speaking, Merle Miller's account of some salty talk with the 33rd President, has sold 2½ million copies. Margaret Truman Daniel's affectionate memoir will be filmed this fall. James Whitmore's theatrical impersonation, Give 'Em Hell Harry! (TIME, May 12) is playing to S.R.O. audiences all across the country. A singularly...
...part, Trumania can be ascribed to nostalgia, the phenomenon that glamorizes everything in the rear-view mirror. But mostly it is the fallout from Watergate. After the chilling scandals of the Nixon regime, the little ex-haberdasher from Missouri seems fit for Mount Rushmore. Of recent Presidents, only Truman and Dwight Eisenhower (whom H.S.T. resented) were able to retire from office with their reputations largely intact. Yet Truman never wasted a second polishing his image. He actively campaigned for Adlai Stevenson as the man to succeed him as Democratic standard bearer-but grumbled that the Hamlet-like Illinois Governor...
...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...