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How Harry Truman Surprised The Country

PARADE asked historian David McCullough, author of a forthcoming biography of Harry Truman, whose 100th anniversary of birth is being observed this week, to write about the making of this particular President. In the course of his research, Mr. McCullough discovered that many of Truman's characteristic qualities were in evidence all along—although it took the Presidency to bring them out.

"IF HARRY TRUMAN CAN BE PRESIDENT, SO CAN MY NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR." THIS WAS A remark commonly heard when the 33rd President of the United States was sworn in on April 12, 1945, following the death in office of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Other remarks were even less kind. Truman was called dull, provincial, a mediocrity, a bumbler. "To err is Truman," people joked. The little hack politician from small-town backwater America was regarded by Washington correspondents as totally unprepared to follow one of the strongest Presidents in U.S. history. Truman, after all, had never been to college. He had failed in business. ("Couldn't even make a go of a haberdashery!") He had held no executive office above the county level.

But then the unexpected happened. Harry Truman turned out to be a strong, decisive President. He worked hard, he got things done, exuding warmth and plucky determination, flashes of temper, flashes of humor. In manner and physical energy, he was more like Theodore Roosevelt than Franklin Roosevelt.

How did this changeover come about? Or, to put the question more accurately, how did the real Harry Truman—the man of decision, leadership and action—emerge from the previously perceived fumbling nonentity?

The truth, as I have found from an examination of the voluminous records at the Truman Library, and from the testimony of people who knew him "when," is that there was a "real" Harry Truman all along and that it required only a series of genuine challenges for his true character to assert itself.

My own change of outlook on Truman's supposedly unexceptional early performance in life began with the discovery of some previously unknown report filed in the year 1904 in a Kansas City bank. Trueman, as his supervisor occasionally spelled it, was then nearly 20 and a file clerk—a job he held for

BY DAVID McCULLOUGH

[[image - photograph of President Harry S. Truman as a child]]

[[photo credit]] Harry S. Truman Library [[/photo credit]]

[[image - photograph of President Harry S. Truman wearing military uniform]]

[[photo credit]] Harry S. Truman Library [[/photo credit]]

[[image - photograph of President Harry S. Truman taking the oath of office with Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, First Lady Bess Wallace Truman, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Harlan Stone]]

[[photo credit]] Goodwin/Washington Post [[/photo credit]]

[[image - photograph of President Harry S. Truman waving from airplane door]]

[[captions of photos]] Four views of the 33rd President: As a boy of 14; as Captain Harry of the 129th Artillery; at his swearing-in the day FDR died; as President, saluting Salt Lake City. [[/captions of photos]]

COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY YOUSUF KARSH/WOODFIN CAMP

PAGE 4 ● MAY 6, 1984 ● PARADE MAGAZINE

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several years after high school, until his father insisted he come home and help on the family farm. Here is what the supervisor, Mr. A.D. Flintom, had to say:

"He is an exceptionally bright young man and...a willing worker...We never had a boy in the vault like him before. He watches everything very closely and, by his watchfulness, detects many errors which a careless boy would let slip through...He is a young man of excellent character and good habits and always at his post of duty and his work is always up. He is very accurate in the filing of letters and the boy is very ambitious and tries hard to please everybody he comes in contact with. I do not know of a better young man in the bank than Trueman."

If there was one turning point in the realization of his potential, it was his success as an artillery officer in the American Expeditionary Force of World War I—all the more striking since he'd once applied to West Point but had been turned down because of poor eyesight.

He need never have gone to war—his eyes were bad, he was past 30, and he was needed on the family farm, where he'd worked for 11 years. But, as Capt. Harry Truman of the 129th Artillery, he was a triumph, as is plain in the record. "This officer is an excellent battery commander," reads a 1918 rating card from his recently opened service records. "He is unusually...well-equipped, and is an excellent instructor. He [is] resourceful and dependable."

In France, he was put in command of an unruly Kansas City unit, Battery D, more than 200 men who were mostly Irish and not known to go easy on any officer, let alone one in big shell-rimmed glasses who still looked a lot like a bank clerk. The morning he took over, he was as frightened as he had ever been.

"I didn't come here to get along with you," he told them. "You've got to get along with me. And if there are any of you who can't speak up right now and I'll bust you right back now." At St.-Mihiel and the Argonne Forest, through some of the heaviest fighting seen by any American unit in World War I, he proved himself tough, courageous and consistently popular. "He was

[[image - photo of President Harry S. Truman holding an issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune with the headline, "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN"]]

[[photo caption]] As he stood on a streetcar caboose in November of 1948, the headline told all...wrong. [[/photo caption]]

When he was 20, his supervisor in Kansas City wrote, "I do not know a better young man in the bank than 'Trueman'"

the boss of the outfit," remembered one man. "He not only commanded the outfit, he owned it...we felt he knew what he was doing."

"He was a wonderful officer," recalled another. "Oh, the best in the world," said still another.

It was his success as Captain Harry that changed everything. He never went back to the farm. In the spring of 1919, he married Bess Wallace and moved into her mother's big frame house in Independence—at 219 N. Delaware St., which was to be his lifelong home—and, drawing on his popularity among other veterans, he went into politics. (The Trumans had been ardent Democrats for generations.) In time, he was elected county judge, a position usually belittled later by writers who knew nothing about it. A judge in Jackson County, Mo., is an administrator. In fact, as chief administrator of the county for eight years, Truman erected and administered courthouses, ran welfare agencies and built what was acknowledged to be one of the best road systems in the country. He had overall responsibility for more than a thousand employees and expenditures of $15 million to $20 million a year.

Meanwhile, however, three things happened that were to be used against him time and again. With an Army friend, Eddie Jacobson, he opened a men's store in Kansas City, a haberdashery, which soon failed. Then, to "get on" in politics, he allied himself with Kansas City's notorious boss, Tom Pendergast, who happened to be the uncle of another Army friend and who happened also to be just as rough and corrupt as he was reputed to be. It also was charged that he joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, but this was simply not true.

The first two events need to be seen in context. If his store went under, so did many others in Kansas City in the early 1920s. A recession, an advance tremor of the Great Depression, had hit the Midwest and so there was little mystery or shame in such failure. Indeed, what most impressed people was not his failure but how he handled it, which was to refuse to declare bankruptcy, as is commonly done. It took him nearly 20 years, but he paid off some $20,000 in haberdashery debts down to the dollar, a point long remembered locally. He was still paying them off while he was in the Senate, when he could barely make ends meet in Washington on his salary.

The Pendergast connection was never disguised, nor very difficult to explain. The plain facts of political life in Jackson County were that no Democrat got anywhere without the approval of the formidable Tom Pendergast. You were on

continued

PARADE MAGAZINE ● MAY 6, 1984 ● PAGE 5

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