Where The Buck Stopped

By WALTER ISAACSON

TITLE: TRUMAN

AUTHOR: DAVID MC CULLOUGH

PUBLISHER: SIMON & SCHUSTER; 1,117 PAGES; $30

THE BOTTOM LINE: A relentlessly detailed biography celebrates America's favorite common-man President.

"Who 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.

In the 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 and finally the White House largely owing to the backing of T.J. Pendergast and other big-city bosses.

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 smoke-filled rooms at the Chicago convention, with Roosevelt paying little heed from afar, they decided that the reliable Senator from Missouri -- an honest man of bright gray hues | and appealing populist pugnacity -- was best suited to be the next President.

And they were right. The scene of Vice President Truman, on the day Roosevelt died in 1945, getting the fateful summons from the White House while drinking bourbon in Speaker Sam Rayburn's hideaway has been colorfully retold many times, most notably in Truman's own folksy memoirs and Robert Donovan's delightfully readable two-volume history of the Truman years. What McCullough provides -- as he did for Teddy Roosevelt in Mornings on Horseback and for the Panama Canal in The Path Between the Seas -- is a sense of historic sweep. The onset of the cold war, the Marshall Plan, the seizure of the steel mills, the Korean War and the sacking of General Douglas MacArthur all read like chapters from an epic novel, and best of all is the wild whistle-stop campaign of 1948, where "Give 'Em Hell" Harry defied the pundits and drew tumultuous crowds to win the most famous upset in American history. McCullough also lovingly captures Truman's sparkle by drawing on the marvelous trove of letters he wrote.

McCullough's main weakness is one he shares with Truman: he occasionally fails to wrestle with the moral complexities of policy. Truman took justifiable pride in his feel for right and wrong, but he was an unreflective man at times, a proudly untroubled non-Hamlet.

Take, for example, Truman's crucial decision to allow the first and last wartime uses of the atom bomb. McCullough peremptorily dismisses the critics, saying that it was for Truman a simple judgment that use of the Bomb would eliminate the need to invade Japan and thus would, and did, save lives. That is probably true. But the juncture between personality and politics that is both interesting and troubling, though not so much to McCullough, is that Truman took this fateful step almost by default, with little agonizing or moral debate or formal consideration.

There were complex alternatives that could have been more fully considered by the President, such as issuing a clear warning to Japan that the U.S. had created an atomic weapon, perhaps combined with a demonstration detonation and a surrender ultimatum that made clear that Japan could retain its Emperor. Likewise McCullough skirts the tortured debate on "atomic diplomacy," reducing it to the question of whether the Bomb was dropped in part to frighten the Soviets and then quickly dismissing this theory without exploring the complexities of revisionist arguments over the causes of the cold war.

Like Truman, McCullough has little use for academic theorizing; instead his marvelous feel for history is based on an appreciation of colorful tales and an insight into personalities. In this compelling saga of America's greatest common-man President, McCullough adds luster to an old-fashioned historical approach that is regaining respect: the sweeping narrative, filled with telling details and an appreciation of the role individuals play in shaping the world.