“If a man is acquainted with what other people have experienced at this desk, it will be easier for him to go through a similar experience. It is ignorance that causes most mistakes.
The man who sits here ought to know his American history, at least.”
—Harry Truman on the presidency
“The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”
—Harry Truman
Truman was the only twentieth-century president without a four-year college degree
He read history at night at the White House, thinking it would help him with the decisions he would need to make
Truman slept soundly the night after he gave the order to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
Truman saw the Cold War as a war of Christianity against atheism
Harry Truman was the perfect embodiment of mid-twentieth-century big-spending, New Deal interest-group liberalism. The product of a corrupt urban machine in his home state of Missouri, Truman was pro-union and generally anti-business, and cautiously supported expanding civil rights protection for blacks. He especially delighted in partisan political battles with Republicans. Whittaker Chambers observed that Truman was “a swift jabber who does his dirty work with a glee that is infectiously impish.” He relished using executive power, and proved a decisive president on many occasions, such as his controversial firing of General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War. Truman was the very embodiment of Alexander Hamilton’s call for “energy in the executive,” and he did not shrink from what Hamilton called the “extensive and arduous enterprises” that history often demands of our presidents. Winston Churchill took an instant liking to Truman at the time of their first meeting in July 1945 because of what Churchill perceived to be Truman’s “precise, sparkling manner and obvious power of decision.”
“Long ago, a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri, he followed an unlikely path—he followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency. And a writer observed, ‘We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,’ and I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman.”
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Governor Sarah Palin, accepting the Republican nomination for vice president, 2008
At the same time, Truman is an excellent marker for how far to the left the Democratic Party moved in the post-war years. Indeed, the party began its long slide to the left during Truman’s administration, and he battled valiantly against it, fighting off a challenge from the 1948 candidacy of the pro-Communist Henry Wallace, who had been Vice President of the United States during Franklin Roosevelt’s third term. (Truman once referred to the pro-Communist elements among American liberals as “the American Crackpots Association.”) It may be considered an act of God’s ongoing provident care for America that FDR saw fit to replace Wallace with Truman as his running mate in 1944.
Truman would be completely unacceptable to the politically correct Democratic Party today. He embraced Biblical morality. He was a moralistic anti-Communist. He had no trouble understanding the Soviet Union as an evil empire. He routinely referred to the Soviet Communists as “barbarians.” He raised hackles in 1941, when a senator, by saying that in the event of war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the United States might want to aid whichever side was losing so the two tyrannies would fight each other to the death—a remark that the Soviets remembered and resented. Upon becoming president following the sudden death of Roosevelt in April 1945, Truman immediately began taking a harder line against the Soviet Union, at that moment still our ally against Germany and Japan. “I’m tired babying the Soviets,” he said. Truman told his diplomatic team that the lopsided agreements favoring the Soviets had to end, and if the Soviets didn’t like it, “they could go to hell.” Clearly Truman would not last long in today’s Democratic Party.
Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bring World War II to a swift and sure end has generated enduring liberal guilt. Truman had not known about the atomic bomb program until he became president. In June of 1945 the American invasion of Okinawa cost the lives of 12,500 American troops, with another 36,000 wounded. The prospective invasion of the Japanese mainland would require almost a million troops. Initial estimates were that America would suffer 50,000 killed and 150,000 wounded in just the first thirty days of an invasion of the Japanese homeland. Japanese losses would surely have been a multiple of these figures, and the fighting would have dragged on into 1946. When Truman learned the news of the atomic bomb project, he immediately grasped the possibility that the war could be ended more quickly and at a much lower cost in lives for both sides, on American terms (unconditional surrender). Truman had served in the Army infantry in World War I over in France and seen action in the trenches. While Truman wrote in his diary that the decision to use the bomb was “my hardest decision to date,” he went to bed and slept soundly the night after he gave the order to use it to end the war.
Before his first White House meeting with Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, Truman promised to explain America’s new attitude toward the Soviets “in words of one syllable.” Molotov, taken aback, said to Truman, “I have never been talked to like that in my life.” Truman’s reply: “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.”
Liberals have never forgiven him for it, and it has been reported that Barack Obama actually wanted to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki on his 2009 “world apology tour” to make an apology for Truman’s act. It required the intervention of Japan’s foreign minister to head off this insult to Japan’s honor. Truman biographer David McCullough puts the case for Truman’s decision to drop the bomb with admirable clarity: “And how could a President, or the others charged with responsibility for the decision, answer to the American people if when the war was over, after the bloodbath of an invasion of Japan, it became known that a weapon sufficient to end the war had been available by midsummer and was not used?”
Truman had a measured attitude about the “burdens” of office and displayed his executive temperament in a letter to his wife Bess after just two months in the Oval Office: “It won’t be long before I can sit back and study the whole picture and tell ’em what is to be done in each department. When things come to that stage there’ll be no more to this job than there was to running Jackson County and not any more worry.” In another letter to Bess he wrote, “Well I’m facing another tall day as usual. But I like ’em that way.”
Despite Truman’s big spending ways on domestic policy, his toleration of some Soviet spies still in place inside the government, and instances of corruption during his administration, on the whole he acquitted himself well in the Oval Office, and provides a useful model of some key traits of a successful president. It was not an accident that Ronald Reagan, who campaigned with Truman in the 1948 election (Reagan was still a Democrat then), made prominent reference to Truman as president thirty-five years later, partly as a way of demonstrating how far the post-Vietnam Democratic Party had strayed from its roots. (Reagan was especially fond of one of Truman’s jokes: “An economist is a man who wears a watch chain with a Phi Beta Kappa key at one end and no watch at the other.”) Sarah Palin also invoked Harry Truman during her vice presidential campaign in 2008—another sign that Truman is now more honored by Republicans than Democrats. To be sure, Truman was an accidental president, chosen in haste to be FDR’s running mate in 1944, and president in the first instance because of FDR’s death. But his triumphant election in his own right in 1948, after a plucky underdog campaign (“Give ’em hell, Harry!”), has propelled him to the higher ranks of modern presidents in reputation.
As the only modern president without a degree from a four-year college, Harry Truman was largely self-taught, but also benefited from a traditional education as a young boy, before liberalism ruined public education. Truman showed a high degree of curiosity at an early age. At age ten he read through Charles Horne’s four-volume set, Great Men and Famous Women; Truman especially enjoyed the essays on military leaders such as Alexander the Great, Hannibal, and Charles Martel. He was a devoted reader of Mark Twain, and in high school read Cicero, Plutarch, Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Gibbon, and Shakespeare, “learning and never forgetting the vices and virtues of the ancients,” in the words of biographer Alonzo Hamby. Late in life Truman reflected on what he took from his education: “I saw that it takes men to make history, or there would be no history. . . . So study men, not historians. You don’t even have to go that far to learn that real history consists of the lives and actions of great men who occupied the stage at the time. Historians’ editorializing is in the same class as the modern irresponsible columnist.”
Truman’s interest in history became a lifelong habit. He read history in the evenings at the White House, in part because it “might help me form an opinion as to the course I had to take.” Truman carried in his wallet a copy of Lord Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall,” which begins, “For I dipt into the future, far as the human eye could see. . . .” After he left the presidency, Truman set down that the “three great men in government” whom he most admired were Cincinnatus, Cato the Younger, and George Washington.
Most historians and biographers have ignored Truman’s strong religious sentiment. It is easy to miss in part because Truman, though a Baptist, was modest about public expressions of religion most of his life, and held ecumenical attitudes. “I’ve always believed that religion is something to live by and not talk about,” he wrote as a young man. Early in his political career he wrote, “If a child is instilled with good morals and is taught the value of the precepts laid down in Exodus 20 and Matthew 5, 6, and 7, there is not much to worry about in after years. It makes no difference what brand is on the Sunday school.” (When Truman was sworn in as president, he had the Bible turned to Exodus 20.)
As president, Truman’s Christian piety loomed much larger in his life than it had previously, in large part because he viewed the challenge of the Cold War in religious terms—as an assault by Communism on the spiritual foundations of Western civilization. He began to speak frequently of the providential mission of the United States, in terms that would find their most distinct echo in Ronald Reagan thirty years later. “God has created us and brought us to our present position of power and strength for some great purpose,” Truman said in a speech in 1951, and that great purpose was defending “the spiritual values—the moral code—against the vast forces of evil that seek to destroy them.” In a 1950 speech Truman was more direct: “Communism attacks our main basic values, our belief in God, our belief in the dignity of man and the value of human life, our belief in justice and freedom. It attacks the institutions that are based on these values. It attacks our churches, our guarantees of civil liberty, our courts, our democratic form of government.” “To succeed in our quest for righteousness,” Truman said, “we must, in St. Paul’s luminous phrase, put on the armor of God.” Truman saw churches as the first line of defense in the war of ideas against Communism, and was disappointed when a number of denominations declined to enlist in an international anti-Communist religious campaign. Truman had asked that churches endorse a statement “of their faith that Christ is their Master and Redeemer and the source of their strength against the host of irreligion and danger in the world.” (Truman also wanted to extend formal diplomatic recognition to the Vatican, but had to drop the idea because of Protestant opposition.) Needless to say, liberals ceased using this kind of language beginning in the 1960s.
Truman had many failures as a president—including the fall of China to Communism in 1949 and the grinding Korean War that began in part because of a diplomatic blunder by his secretary of state, Dean Acheson. The Korean War was one important reason for Truman’s growing unpopularity with the American people. He left office in 1953 with some of the lowest public approval ratings in presidential history.
Despite the Korean War stalemate, foreign policy was Truman’s main achievement. After World War II ended, the United States found itself in a position it had never been in before—the undisputed leader of the free world, but faced with a new foe that only it could match. War-weary Americans rightly looked forward to demobilization and a return to peacetime preoccupations, but the world situation was not so accommodating. Truman faced the requirement of assembling a long-term international alliance along with a strategic doctrine and defense establishment to carry on the long struggle against Communist expansionism. The U.S. had never before contemplated this kind of high-profile role in global affairs, nor had it ever maintained large-scale armed forces in peacetime. But the Cold War meant there could be no ordinary peacetime.
The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism by Elizabeth Edwards Spalding (University Press of Kentucky, 2006).
Truman settled on the doctrine of “containment,” assembled the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), passed the Marshall Plan to help Europe rebuild, and announced the “Truman Doctrine,” according to which the U.S. pledged to aid free nations that were resisting Communist aggression (chiefly Greece in 1946). Truman succeeded in winning substantial Republican support for his grand strategy, so that it become the truly bipartisan foreign policy for almost a generation, until liberal Democrats began to jettison it piece by piece in the 1970s. But even with his own fellow Democrats abandoning the foreign policy architecture he put in place, Truman’s design held long enough to find final vindication under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
Truman, generally sure-footed in his use of executive power, went too far a few times and strayed into unconstitutional territory. In 1952 Truman ordered the government to seize and operate the nation’s steel mills, then threatened with a strike that Truman thought might harm the Korean War effort. As there was no statutory authority for Truman’s act, he justified the seizure under his broad powers as commander in chief. The Supreme Court did not agree, ruling 6–3 that Truman had exceeded his presidential power under the Constitution and violated the separation of powers in acting without congressional authorization. (The steel industry was represented in the case by John W. Davis—the Democratic nominee for president who had lost to Calvin Coolidge in 1924.)
This was one of the rare direct clashes between the president and the Supreme Court, and a stunning rebuke to the executive branch. Two of Truman’s own appointees to the Court, including his former attorney general Tom Clark, joined the majority against him. (Putting that “damn fool from Texas” on the Court was his biggest mistake as president, Truman complained. It would not be the last time a president regretted a Supreme Court appointment.)
Truman made four appointments to the Supreme Court. The first, Harold Burton, was an odd choice, as Burton was a Republican senator from Ohio. (There were no Republicans left on the Court in 1945 when the seat came open, and Truman felt pressure to nominate a Republican for “balance.”) Burton was a moderate justice, generally pro-business in his opinions, who left little mark in his thirteen years on the Court. Truman’s second appointment was Frederick Vinson as Chief Justice in 1946, following the death of Harlan Stone. Legal historians have regarded Vinson as an undistinguished Chief Justice and even an outright failure in his relatively brief seven years on the Court.
“Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.”
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Harry Truman
Truman’s third appointment, of Attorney General Thomas Clark, prompted charges of cronyism, though Clark was confirmed easily. He seems to have had no clear or consistent judicial philosophy, though he was the author of the famous 1961 opinion that created the “exclusionary rule,” making it more difficult for police to gather evidence against criminals. (Clark was also the father of the far-left activist lawyer Ramsey Clark, attorney general in the LBJ administration.)
Truman’s last appointment was Sherman Minton, a former U.S. senator and strong supporter of New Deal liberalism, including even FDR’s radical court packing plan. During his brief seven years on the Court, Minton never saw an expansion of government power that he didn’t approve.
Truman’s Supreme Court appointments seemed to be driven mostly by old-fashioned considerations of political patronage. Neither his judicial appointments nor any of his writings or speeches give much evidence that Truman had any discernable constitutional philosophy. For these reasons he deserves as his constitutional grade a gentleman’s C+.