How Harry Truman Became Legendary
Good morning, it’s May 8. Today is the birthday of Harry Truman, the patron saint of beleaguered presidents.
The Missouri senator did not initially seek national office. He was foisted on Franklin Roosevelt by Democratic Party bosses, and accepted the assignment as FDR’s 1944 running mate reservedly. “The vice president,” he complained privately, “simply presides over the Senate and sits around hoping for a funeral.”
The funeral that came his way was Roosevelt’s own, and although the president had been quite ill, nobody in the country seems to have been prepared for his death, including the man who assumed his job.
Harry Truman served 82 days as vice president under Franklin Roosevelt. During that time he had only three official meetings with FDR. There wasn’t a great deal of other interaction between the two men, either. This was by Roosevelt’s design.
Before heading to Europe after his 1945 inauguration, Roosevelt issued written instructions to Truman on how - and how much - he could communicate with the president. FDR advised his Number Two to send messages via the White House Map Room, but only if the matter was “extremely” urgent.
“I ask,” Roosevelt added, "that you make them as brief as possible.”
This reluctance to share power with the vice president would come at a price. The world was still at war when Roosevelt died, and the list of issues about which Harry Truman knew little or nothing included the Manhattan Project and the promises made by FDR to Churchill and Stalin at Yalta.
“Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now,” Truman told the White House press corps the day after assuming office. “I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”
In the ensuing months and years, Truman would approve the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, integrate the U.S. armed forces by executive order, launch the Marshall Plan, briefly nationalize the steel mills (before the Supreme Court said he couldn’t), and become the first in a long succession of commanders-in-chief to oversee the American side of the Cold War.
Throughout his tumultuous tenure, Truman was not all that popular; and he left office a disliked president with whom members of his own party refused to campaign. His reputation was rehabilitated after he left office, however, and a parade of successive presidents have attempted to re-formulate Truman’s magic elixir.
In 1992, George H.W. Bush invited Truman biographer David McCullough to the White House for a crash course on how Little Harry pulled out his unexpected 1948 victory. It was not to be for the senior Bush, but Bill Clinton often mentioned Truman’s name after running into second-term problems of his own.
George W. Bush did the same thing when his poll numbers plunged to Truman-like levels, and Bush took to noting publicly that Truman’s reassessment occurred long after he’d left the White House. Even popular presidents, not excepting Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan, have invoked the Truman talisman.
Obama associated himself with Truman while proposing the Affordable Care Act, and while running for reelection. Reagan did it constantly, evoking Truman’s example more than 130 times as president.
This was not as incongruous as it seems. Truman was the last Democrat Reagan ever campaigned for, and his fond memories of Truman’s presidency were not a put-on. On May 8, 1984, Reagan held a lunch at the White House on the centennial of Truman’s birth. Those who were there have never forgotten it.
“A long century has passed since he was born a hundred years ago today, but he's still a vital presence,” Reagan said that day. “He lives on in the American consciousness. He is a shared memory. Harry Truman in the pearl-grey Stetson and the light-grey suit and the round-rimmed glasses and the walking stick. Harry Truman on his morning stroll, the brisk cadence of his walk matched by the blunt rhythm of his speech. Plain-spoken, plain-talking, no-nonsense Harry.”
Reagan also told a riveting story about a White House luncheon Truman held for party leaders, which included a tense exchange with a Southern Democrat.
“He had recently put forward a 10-point plan to outlaw racial segregation,” Reagan recalled, “and a Democratic committeewoman from Alabama stood up and said, ‘Mr. President, I want to take a message back to the South. Can I tell them you’re not ramming miscegenation down our throats?’”
“Harry Truman looked at her, and then he recited the Bill of Rights,” Reagan continued. “And when he was done he said, ‘I’m everybody’s President. I take back nothing of what I propose, and I make no excuse for it.’ A White House waiter became so excited listening to the argument that he accidentally knocked a cup of coffee out of the president’s hands.”
Reagan’s story was met with laughter and a smattering of applause. It made an impression on one of Truman’s two grandsons who was in the audience, Clifton Truman Daniel. He’s a chip off the old block.
I called Clifton Daniel after Barack Obama was elected and asked him what the man he calls “Grandpa” would have thought about voters choosing an African-American president 60 years after he integrated the armed forces.
“He would have thought,” Daniel replied, “’It’s about damned time.’”
