Truman by David McCollough is of course, the biography of Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for history. Though not the best biography I have ever read (that honor goes to T. Harry William's Huey Long), Truman was a moving portrait of a man who, in my opinion, was the third best president we have ever had, after George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
McCollough's assessment of Truman was that the was worldly and honest, a genuine down-to-earth American who was so great because he was so normal. McC ollough relishes telling story after story about Truman's kindness to people beneath him, about how he knew all his gardeners by name, or how he drove to the hospital while he was president to see the newborn child of one of his bodyguards. "Truman the Human" as he was called in his day, stands astride each page.
It is hard to argue with McCollough's assessment of HST, though one stops to wonder from time to time if Truman is not so much a history of a man as a canonization of a secular saint. I recall years ago reading Carl Sandburg's awe-filled Lincoln biography, only to have my impressions cut down to size a bit years later by a historian who criticized Sandburg for a work that was drawn more from Lincoln's homespun myth than from the man.
Truman rests on firmer ground, though. HST's greatest exponents are people with great credibility themselves -- George Marshall, Dean Acheson, Winston Churchill, William Douglas, Fred Vinson. When Sir Winston Churchill says
I must confess, sir . . . . I held you in very low regard then [at the Potsdam conference in 1945]. I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt . . . . I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you more than any other man, have saved Western civilization. (p 874-75)
it is almost impossible to argue against Truman's almost mystical greatness.
The book has a few weaknesses. Most importantly, McCollough seems interested primarily in narrative, and the storytelling drive often overwhelms important aspects of Truman's story. Most of Truman's greatest accomplishments were in foreign policy, and McC rarely pauses to analyze key points. He drops the term Truman Doctrine without clearly defining it. He speaks briefly about George Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow and the crucial political position paper NSC-68, but never compares and contrasts their approach to U.S.-Soviet relations. The shift from Kennan's opinion that U.S. deterrence should focus primarily on Europe and should use the nuclear threat as its primary tool to the NSC-68 position that conventional forces should also be used and that Soviet influence should be combatted at every level including in the third world (that is, Korea and Vietnam) was a major shift in U.S. foreign policy. McC never directly addresses this.
McCollough also does a poor job of explaining the patronage scandals that dogged Truman in his second term. He is so interested in HST and the problems of his daily life that he never steps outside of the Oval Office and explains the viewpoint of his detractors. Truman endured withering criticism over these scandals and McCollough never clearly explains their justification or why they affected his popularity so adversely.
The largest omission though, is the election of 1948. Truman beat Thomas Dewey in a come-from-behind victory that was one of the most surprising in American political history. Why did the polls and the pundits get it so wrong. McCollough talks about a great deal of "soul searching" in the press after the election, but he never renders a verdict. What happened? Were the polls flawed? Did the press simply rush to premature judgment? Perhaps he felt the question had been handled by other authors too well, but he owes it to his readers to weigh in. Polls are a fact of life in modern politics, and readers deserve to know if the Truman upset was just a fluke or if it exposed major flaws in political polling.
Still, from the pages of this book rise a great man. No one could have rendered a portrait so warm and real. As I read, I loved Harry as much as any fictional character I have ever read. Truman is so great because he was so typical. Here McCollough is unafraid to issue a verdict:
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. (p 991)
And in the mouth of Adlai Stevenson III on the very last page, he notes:
[Harry Truman is] 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. (p992)
There is no better way to close than with a Mark Twain quotation Harry liked to use himself: "Always do right. It will amaze some people and astonish the rest."