V

“He was not a hero or a magician or a chess player, or an obsession. He was a certifiable member of the human race, direct, fallible, and unexpectedly wise when it counted,” wrote Mary McGrory in the Washington Star the next day, in one of hundreds of published tributes.

He did not require to be loved. He did not expect to be followed blindly. Congressional opposition never struck him as subversive, nor did he regard his critics as traitors. He never whined.

He walked around Washington every morning—it was safe then. He met reporters frequently as a matter of course, and did not blame them for his failures. He did not use the office as a club or a shield, or a hiding place. He worked at it…. He said he lived by the Bible and history. So armed, he proved that the ordinary American is capable of grandeur. And that a President can be a human being….

He was remembered in print and over the air waves, in the halls of Congress and in large parts of the world, as a figure of courage and principle. Even Time and The Wall Street Journal, publications that had often scorned him in years past, acclaimed him now as one of the great figures of the century.

The obituary in The New York Times ran seven pages. (When the writer, Alden Whitman of The Times, had been preparing it in advance years before and went to Independence to interview Truman himself, feeling extremely uneasy about the whole assignment, Truman greeted him with a smile, saying, “I know why you’re here and I want to help you all I can.”)

In a day of memorial tributes in the Senate chamber that he so loved, he was eulogized as the president who had faced the momentous decision of whether to use the atomic bomb, praised for the creation of the United Nations, for the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the recognition of Israel, NATO; for committing American forces in Korea and for upholding the principle of civilian control over the military—“decisions many of us would pale before,” said Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin.

He was remembered as the first president to recommend Medicare, remembered for the courage of his stand on civil rights at the risk of his political fortunes. The whistle-stop campaign was recalled as one of the affirming moments in the history of the American political system.

His lack of glamour, the “cronies” and loud Florida shirts, the angry letters and the taint of the “Truman scandals,” seemed to fade in memory. The scandals, squalid as they were, would with time appear almost tame in contrast to the corrupt excesses of later administrations.

The frequently quoted view of Sam Rayburn that Truman was right on all the big decisions, wrong on all the little ones, was hardly accurate. His Loyalty Program, a very large decision, had been woefully wrong—as was the appointment of Louis Johnson, as was the high-handed seizure of the steel industry—while the restoration of Herbert Hoover to public service and public esteem was not only a right and generous “small” decision, but one that said much about Truman’s essential human quality.

That he would later be held accountable by some critics for the treacheries and overbearing influence of the CIA, as well as for the Vietnam War, was understandable but unjustified. He never intended the CIA to become what it did. His decisions concerning Vietnam by no means predetermined all that followed under later, very different presidents.

His insistence that the war in Korea be kept in bounds, kept from becoming a nuclear nightmare, would figure more and more clearly as time passed as one of his outstanding achievements. And rarely had a president surrounded himself with such able, admirable men as Stimson, Byrnes, Marshall, Forrestal, Leahy, Acheson, Lovett, Elsenhower, Bradley, Clifford, Lilienthal, Harriman, Bohlen, and Kennan—as time would also confirm. It was as distinguished a group as ever served the country, and importantly, he had supported them as they supported him.

Born in the Gilded age, the age of steam and gingerbread Gothic, Truman had lived to see a time of lost certainties and rocket trips to the moon. The arc of his life spanned more change in the world than in any prior period in history. A man of nineteenth-century background, he had had to face many of the most difficult decisions of the unimaginably different twentieth century. A son of rural, inland America, raised only a generation removed from the frontier and imbued with the old Jeffersonian ideal of a rural democracy, he had had to assume command of the most powerful industrial nation on earth at the very moment when that power, in combination with stunning advances in science and technology, had become an unparalleled force in the world. The responsibilities he bore were like those of no other president before him, and he more than met the test.

Ambitious by nature, he was never torn by ambition, never tried to appear as something he was not. He stood for common sense, common decency. He spoke the common tongue. As much as any president since Lincoln, he brought to the highest office the language and values of the common American people. He held to the old guidelines: work hard, do your best, speak the truth, assume no airs, trust in God, have no fear. Yet he was not and had never been a simple, ordinary man. The homely attributes, the Missouri wit, the warmth of his friendship, the genuineness of Harry Truman, however appealing, were outweighed by the larger qualities that made him a figure of world stature, both a great and good man, and a great American president.

“Watch the President,” Admiral King had whispered to Lord Moran at Potsdam. “This is all new to him, but he can take it. He is a more typical American than Roosevelt, and he will do a good job….”

With his ability to “take it,” his inner iron, his bedrock faith in the democratic process, his trust in the American people, and his belief that history was the final, all-important judge of performance, he was truly exceptional. He never had a doubt about who he was, and that too was part of his strength, as well as the enjoyment of life he conveyed.

He was the kind of president the founding fathers had in mind for the country. He came directly from the people. He was America. In his time, in his experience, from small town to farm to World War in far-off France in 1918; from financial failure after the war to the world of big-city machine politics to the revolutionary years of the New Deal in Washington to the surge of American power during still another terrible World War, he had taken part in the great chronicle of American life as might have a character in a novel. There was something almost allegorical about it all: The Man of Independence and His Odyssey.

The “lesson” of Truman’s life, said Senator Adlai E. Stevenson III of Illinois, was a lesson about ourselves: “an object lesson in the vitality of popular government; an example of the ability of this society to yield up, from the most unremarkable origins, the most remarkable men.”

Dean Acheson had called him the Captain with the Mighty Heart; George Marshall, in 1948, had said it was “the integrity of the man” that would stand down the ages, more even than the courage of his decisions. Eric Sevareid, who observed at close range so much of the history of the era and its protagonists, would say nearly forty years later of Truman, “I am not sure he was right about the atomic bomb, or even Korea. But remembering him reminds people what a man in that office ought to be like. It’s character, just character. He stands like a rock in memory now.”

He had lived eighty-eight years and not quite eight months. Bess Truman lived on at 219 North Delaware for another ten years. She died there on October 18, 1982, and was buried beside him in the courtyard of the Truman Library.

Acknowledgments

For a biographer, the great body of surviving letters, diaries, private memoranda, and autobiographical sketches written by Harry S. Truman is a treasure beyond compare. There is really nothing like the Truman manuscript collection at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence. The letters he wrote between 1910 and 1959 to the idolized love of his life, Bess Wallace Truman, are thought to number 1,302—but no one really knows what the exact total may be—and there are thousands more in his own hand, to his mother, his sister, to his cousins Nellie and Ethel Noland, to old Army friends, Dean Acheson, fellow politicians, newspaper editors, friend, and foe, as well as long diary entries. Truman poured himself out on paper with vigor and candor all of his adult life. For a latter-day writer trying to understand him and tell his story in the context of his times, it is Truman himself, again and again, who makes it possible to go below the surface, to know what he felt, what he wanted, his worries, his anger, the exceptional and the commonplace details of his days. Few Americans of any era, irrespective of background or profession, have left such a vivid personal record, quite apart from the immense volume of his official papers, and it is almost certain that we will never again have a President who leaves so candid and revealing an account. Or one written in such a clear hand. In addition to all else that he did for his country, Harry Truman gave us a very large part of himself and his times in his own words, and in my efforts to write his life, during ten years of work on this book, there has been no one to whom I have felt more gratitude.

The staff archivists, librarians, and other specialists at the Harry S. Truman Library have been helpful in countless ways, instructive, patient, generous with their time, generous with ideas and advice, since the morning I first walked in the door one very cold winter day early in 1982. Though they are in no way responsible for any errors of fact or judgment in these pages, there is no part of the book in which they have not played a role, both in what they have helped to uncover in the library collection and in what they themselves know of Truman’s life from years of interest and study. In my experience, there is no more agreeable place in which to do research than the Truman Library. Nor has there been anyone on the staff who has not shown an interest in my work or failed to be helpful. I am grateful to them all. But for their particular help and friendship over the years I wish to express my utmost thanks to: Benedict K. Zobrist, director, and George Curtis, assistant director; archivists Philip D. Lagerquist, Erwin J. Mueller, and Dennis Bilger; photographic librarian Pauline Testerman; the very good-natured, resourceful Elizabeth Safly, research librarian and creator and keeper of the so-called vertical file, a mine of marvelous information; Vicky Alexander, Clay Bauske, Robin Burgess, Carol Briley, Millie Carol, John Curry, Patricia Dorsey; J. R. Fuchs, Ray Geselbracht, Anita Heavener, Jann Hoag, Niel Johnson, Earl Pennington, Warren Ohrvall, Ruth Springston, and Mark Beveridge, who knows more about World War I than anyone I know.

I wish also to express my particular indebtedness to the following published works about Truman: his own two-volume Memoirs and Margaret Truman Daniel’s Harry S. Truman, a lively, often moving memoir by an adoring daughter; The Man of Independence by Jonathan Daniels, which though incomplete as a biography and anything but impartial (it was written while Truman was still President and Daniels served on Truman’s staff), nonetheless contains much on Truman’s early life not to be found elsewhere; Truman by Roy Jenkins, a too-brief survey of the Truman presidency, but very valuable for its insights; John Hersey’s Aspects of the Presidency, which includes his deft New Yorker profile of Truman, written after an unprecedented chance to follow the President through several crucial days during the second term; The Truman Presidency, The History of a Triumphant Succession by Cabell Phillips, who wrote from firsthand observation as a correspondent for The New York Times; and Plain Speaking, Merle Miller’s popular compilation of reminiscences by the elderly former President and others close to him. Though not altogether reliable as to fact, it has the vitality of its subject and contains much of value.

The three leading Truman scholars of our day are Alonzo L. Hamby, Robert J. Donovan, and Robert H. Ferrell, and I have benefited greatly from their work—from Professor Hamby’s many articles; from Robert Donovan’s comprehensive two-volume study of the Truman presidency,Conflict and Crisis and The Tumultuous Years, fine books by a writer who covered the Truman White House as a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune; and from Robert H. Ferrell for his advice, friendship, and a whole shelf of Truman books, including The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman, a skillful stitching together of Truman’s own sketches about himself, and two collections of Truman letters and other writings, Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman and Dear Bess: The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1910–1959. Everyone who writes about Truman is indebted to Professor Ferrell for these invaluable books.

My bibliography follows, with the principal sources of manuscript and published works, and includes the names of the more than 125 people who agreed to be interviewed for this book. I thank each and all many times over. A number of the interviews were done over several days, and at intervals of several years. Most of the longer interviews were taped, unless this was against the wishes of the interviewee. When a tape recorder was not used, I kept notes. And while all those who generously gave of their time contributed to my understanding of the subject—and including many who are not directly quoted in the book—I want to thank the following especially: Margaret Truman Daniel for three long interviews, including an all-day session in the Truman home at Independence done for the public television series Smithsonian World; Clifton Daniel, who talked for several hours over lunch in New York and during a thirty-block walk back uptown; Clark Clifford, who gave many hours of his time over a span of ten years and whose recollections and insights were of greatest possible value; George Elsey, who, like Clark Clifford, played a key role in the Truman administration and whose memory for details and sense of history has helped to give life and balance to my recounting of events in ways that would never have been possible otherwise; Rex Scouten, Curator of the White House, and Floyd Boring, both of whom were part of President Truman’s Secret Service detail and who not only spent hours recalling people and events, but took a Saturday afternoon to walk me through what happened at Blair House, inside and out, the day the Puerto Rican nationalists tried to kill the President; James and Martha Ann Truman Swoyer of Oskaloosa, Kansas, who, in addition to talking with me at length about their Uncle Harry, let me see and make notes from his high school workbooks, wonderful, important documents that are quoted here for the first time; the late Merle Miller, who gave me one of the earliest, most interesting of the interviews, and granted me exclusive access to his recorded conversations with former President Truman which are on file at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library but closed to researchers at Miller’s request; the late Stephen Slaughter, who grew up next door to the Truman farm, who knew Harry Truman when he was a farmer, and whose superb book, History of a Missouri Farm Family, and personal recollections of life in Grandview helped immeasurably in recreating that vanished time and way of life; Joe Pruett of Kansas City, who helped track down former members of the Pendergast organization, who took me to 1908 Main, up the narrow stairs, to see where Tom Pendergast once ruled, and who, with his wife Catherine Pendergast Pruett, let me examine a wealth of Pendergast family letters, photographs, and memorabilia, and talked with great candor and understanding about the whole Pendergast era; and Sue Gentry, who began writing about life in Independence in the 1930s as a reporter for the Examiner and is still going strong, in her “Local Gentry” column in the paper. From the vantagepoint of her home on West Waldo, around the corner from the Truman house, she knows “the whole story.”

For their very valuable comments and suggestions on various portions of the manuscript, I thank Paul Horgan, Charlton Ogburn, Anna Loomis McCandless, John T. Galvin, John Zentay, Paul Nagel, George Elsey, Mark Beveridge, Liz Safly, Erwin Mueller, Lyman Field, the late John Oliver, Charles Guggenheim, and Richard Baker, Historian of the United States Senate.

Richard Baker also arranged for me to retrace the steps of Vice President Harry Truman at the Capitol the fateful evening of April 12, 1945, and with Capitol police officers William E. Uber and John D. Roach, we ran, as Truman did, from one end of the Capitol to the other, from what was Sam Rayburn’s hideaway back along the lower halls and corridors to the Vice President’s office. When I first inquired if it would be possible for me to make the run, Dr. Baker said, “Only if I can come too.”

Paul Nagel, Pat O’Brien, and Brent Schondelmeyer, three historians and authors who grew up in Independence and share a passion for Missouri history, gave me a wonderful day’s tour of Jackson County for which I will always be grateful. Lyman Field recalled his memorable experience with President Truman the morning after the 1948 election and introduced me to dozens of people in Kansas City who took an interest in my project.

I wish to thank also for their continuing help and interest: the staff of the Boston Athenaeum, and especially director Rodney Armstrong and research librarian Jan Malcheski; David Wigdor and others of the Manuscript Division, the Library of Congress; Carol Dage of the Liberty Memorial Library in Kansas City; the staff of the National Archives, and particularly Military Historian Edward Reese, who saved me many hours and much frustration in documenting the casualty estimates anticipated in an invasion of Japan in 1945; the staff of the Jackson County Historial Society; Norman J. Reigle and others of the National Park Service who do such an excellent job at the Truman home—the Harry S. Truman National Historic Site; Aurora Davis of the Kansas City Star Library; Ralph Graves, former Editor-in-Chief of Time, Inc., who arranged access to theTime-Life files; Harry Middleton and his staff at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library; Helen Bergen of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Library, Washington, D.C.; the Yale University Library; the West Tisbury Public Library; the Cornell University Library; the Smithsonian Institution.

To the following I am also indebted in many ways: Henry Adams; Clarence A. Barnes, Jr., Mary Margaret Bell of the Kentucky Historical Society; the late Walter H. Bieringer; Robert Blafield; Barrington Boardman; Walt Bodine; Daniel J. Boorstin; Charles Burke; Brian Burns; the late Martin Carr; Major General William A. Carter; Carl Charlson; Bernice J. Conley, County Clerk at the Kansas City Courthouse; Paul W. Cook, Jr.; L. P. Cookingham, Frances Cottingham and the Shelby County Historical Society; Annette Curtis; Albert A Eisele; Christa Fischer; Pauline Fowler; Andrew J. Glass; Neil Goodwin and Margot Barnes Street; Katherine Graham; William and Joyce Graves; Shannon Gregory; David Grubin; Janet Helm; Thomas Hill; William F. P. Hugonin; Oliver Jenson, who let me borrow his complete bound set of Life for the Truman years; Emerson and Matilee Johnson; Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.; Chester and Joan Kerr; James Ketchum; Richard Ketchum; Arthur M. Klebanof; Jill Kneerim; the late Kathleen Moore Knight; Professor Robert Knowles; Laurelle O’Leary; Mark Mazer; John Mayhew; Harry McPherson; Cynthia Miller; Richard Miller; Wilson D. Miscamble; James Mongello; James Morrison; Royall O’Brien; Pat O’Neill; Margaret K. Olwine; Harlene Stapf Palkuti; Arva Parks; Eleanor R. Piacenza; Monty B. Poen; Barbara J. Potts, former mayor of Independence; Henry Hope Reed; Donald Ritchie; Judge Howard Sachs; Professor William Sand; Francis N. Satterlee; Michael Shapiro of the St. Louis Art Museum; Al Silverman; Robert C. Smith; Raymond W. Smock, Historian of Congress; Richard Snow; Marie-Cecile and Alfred E. Street; Audrey Stubbart; the late Barbara Tuchman; Geoffrey Ward; Laura and Robert Wilson; Philip F. Ziedman; William Zinsser.

I am deeply grateful to: the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a fellowship grant that helped make possible an additional year of research; J. Gordon Kingsley, president of William Jewell College in Liberty, for the opportunity to learn about Missouri by living there, as writer-in-residence at William Jewell; Haroldine Helm, who provides welcome comforts of home for researchers at the Truman Library, even researchers and their families; the tireless, resourceful Mike Hill, research specialist, who helped through thick and thin; Shirley Mayhew, Sarah Mayhew, Lynn S. Worthington, Ed Wise, and Eric Moe, who, with Mike Hill, assisted with the source notes.

For the design and production of the book I gratefully acknowledge the work of three splendid people, Eve Metz, Frank Metz, and Sophie Sorkin of Simon & Schuster. I thank Wendell Minor for his stunning original portrait of Truman for the dust jacket. And for the immensely helpful contributions she has made as copy editor, I thank Ann Adelman.

To Richard Snyder and Peter Schwed of Simon & Schuster, for their initial enthusiasm for a Truman biography, my wholehearted appreciation. I thank especially my editor, Michael Korda. With his professional advice and good cheer, my friend and literary agent Morton L. Janklow has been a mainstay throughout, for which I am extremely grateful.

For all their efforts typing the manuscript, I thank Patricia Kendall and Kathryn Harcourt. I thank again my daughter. Melissa and her husband John McDonald, for a wealth of favors and interest; my son David, for his invaluable suggestions on the manuscript; my son Bill, for research assistance in Missouri and for traveling with me as driver, photographer, companion, and “interpreter” across France, following Captain Harry Truman through World War I; my son Geoffrey, for his help with research at the Library of Congress; and my daughter Dorie, who uncovered valuable material about the White House, who, when the end seemed near, warned, me not to let up, and to whom the book is happily, proudly dedicated.

And with all my heart I thank my wife, Rosalee Barnes McCullough, who took part every step of the way and always to the benefit of the work and the author.

—David McCullough

   Washington, D.C.; Liberty, Missouri;

   Ithaca, New York; West Tisbury, Massachusetts

January 11, 1992