Trumania in the '70s

By Stefan Kanfer

"I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell."

--Harry S Truman

He seems, at first glance, an odd candidate to be the object of a cult. The nation is exhausted by its Indochina war. He was in the White House during another bitterly debated Asian conflict. Detente remains the Administration's diplomatic goal. He was a general in the cold war. Politics is perhaps the most discredited profession in the country. He knew no other way of life.

And yet, some 25 years after leaving office and 2 1/2 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 2 1/2 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 ardent fan of the Truman boom is Gerald Ford, who recently assured Mrs. Daniel, "Everyone who knows me knows how I feel about your father."* Such high-level boosterism has given the country a sudden fit of Trumania. In addition to the books, there are Truman T shirts, bumper stickers and even a song by the rock group Chicago: "america's calling ... harry, you'd know what to do."

In 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 "was too busy making up his mind whether he had to go to the bathroom or not." Enemies fared far worse, rhetorically. According to Merle Miller, Truman called Nixon "a shifty-eyed goddam liar," and described General Douglas MacArthur as "a man there wasn't anything real about."

A few 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.

In 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 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 and soon found himself, much to his own surprise, Roosevelt's running mate in 1944. As President, he announced himself as a friend of the laboring man; yet he once threatened to seize the railroads and install the Army to run them when faced with a nationwide strike.

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.

Nothing in his background as a journeyman Middle Western politician prepared him for the kind of decisions he had to make in the White House. Yet he made those choices, without swagger or rhetoric. (It is 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.

It is a 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.

Despite the sentiment of the Chicago song, it is doubtful that "harry"--who lived in an age when everything, including the problems of the presidency, seemed simpler--would know what to do now. Some of his style, however, might well be recycled for the '70s. For if it is impossible to imagine what Truman would have done 25 years later, it is easy to picture what he would not have done. He would not have maintained a closed presidency: his press conferences were regular and scrappy, and he was constantly bantering with reporters on his brisk strolls around Washington and New York. Instinctively, he would have rejected military advice that violated his common sense; thus, when MacArthur tried to escalate the Korean conflict, Truman fired him for "insubordination." He would not have lied to the public or cared what the press said about him--one of the few journalists who ever felt his ire was a Washington Post music critic who had panned a Margaret Truman song recital.

The Truman boom suggests that charisma and overweening ambition are played out in American politics, that frankness and solidity are back in vogue. It is a promising sign of the times that a Truman bust now stares out from an honored place in Gerald Ford's Oval Office. For the statue is a symbol--a genuine recognition by one plain man of another plain man who somehow managed to transcend his limitations. As Harry Truman would have said, there are far worse aspirations for elected officials--and damn few better ones.

--Stefan Kanfer

* In fact, Ford was not always so enthusiastic. In the '50s, the then Representative from Michigan's Fifth District decried Truman's "shabby lack of concern over the public welfare."

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