David McCullough - The Truman Biography (Part 1)

First of all, Harry Truman is one of my favorite Presidents.  Like many people, if I were asked to name the 3 great US Presidents, I would say Washington, Lincoln, and FDR.  My next group would include Truman and I would have to give special consideration to Truman since he had the almost impossible task of succeeding Franklin Roosevelt.  Yet most Presidential historians would place HST in the great or near great category.  Even Ronald Reagan, arch Republican, professed to like Truman.

McCullough is magnificent in documenting the flow of people across the midwest to settle in Missouri.  Truman had hardworking yoeman forbearers.  What strikes me forcibly also is that Independence comes across like Birmingham or Little Rock.  Independence was a Southern town.  HST had a Southern upbringing yet later on he would transcend that provincial upbringing.  I like people who grow beyond their narrow upbringing.

Yes, he was  a product of the Pendergast machine.  McCullough gives the reader a graphic understanding of machine politics.  The Pendergasts had a quite an organization.  It all came apart at the end, but HST never renounced his benefactors.  Were he not the "Senator from Pendergast" he never would have been President and the world would have been the loser.

His experience in France was transformative.  The interest in politics seems to have been there from the beginning.  He is presented as doing a great job as a county judge (commissioner).  You get the impression that he was at best Pendergast's fourth choice as a Senate candidate in 1934 and then he won reelection on his own by some 8,000 votes in 1940.  It could have ended there and who knows for sure who would have come after FDR in 1945.  In retrospect, future history hung in the balance.

His courting of Bess Wallace and her dominating mother seemed to go on forever, but eventually HST got his woman!  I have never figured out if I like Bess Truman or not.  To have lived in the same house with his mother-in-law must have cruel and unusual punishment.  How did he stand it for so long?

HST seemed to fit in well as a Senator although he was shunned by many as the Senator from Pendergast.  His work exhausting work on waste and profiteering in the defense industry as the country prepared for war was exemplary.

The VP mess at the Democratic Convention in 1944 was a travesty and it was all due to FDR.  Roosevelt liked to play these Byzantine games of giving different people different impressions of his desires without being honest and forthright about his wishes.  This was typical of FDR and people suffered because of his political gamesmanship.

What was in FDR's mind?  Who did he really want for his running mate?  Apparently we will never know for sure.  All we can say is that thank goodness it turned out to be Truman.  Given what happened subsequently in world events we can be thankful that it wasn't Wallace.  Henry Wallace was a great liberal but he was too liberal.  He really was weird.  He would have been a horrible President.  I don't know about Byrnes or Douglas.  Just be thankful it was Truman!
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Mamma Truman always told Harry, "Now you be good, Harry." He almost always WAS good, but Mamma could also observe that "being too good is apt to be uninteresting." So remember the Mother Truman Doctrine: be good, but not too good.