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[[Parade magazine article]]
TRUMAN/continued

friendly terms or you chose another line of work. Truman said Pendergast never asked him to do anything dishonest ("He knew I wouldn't do it if he asked me"), and nothing was ever found to suggest differently. Not a hint of scandal was associated with Truman himself. No one ever questioned his honesty, which is exactly why Pendergast was happy to have him in politics, and why later he picked Truman for the Senate. Clean, upright, popular, able Harry Truman-a man who always tried his level best at everything he ever did-could give Jackson County politics a good name.

Truman was elected to the Senate for the first time in 1934, when he was 50 years old. Pendergast fell from power in 1936 and eventually went to prison for tax fraud. When Pendergast died in Kansas City in 1945, six days after Truman became Vice President, Truman flew from Washington to the funeral in the face of great outrage that a Vice President would so honor the memory of an ex-convict. In Missouri, it was not seen that way. "He was always my friend, and I have always been his," Truman said. To most people, he was making good on another of his debts.

He won his second term in the Senate in 1940 in the stiffest uphill fight of his political life-it was worse even, he always said, than the 1948 Presidential election-and he won without Pendergast. And it was in the second term during World War II, that he came into his own as a figure of influence and respect in Washington. With Pendergast gone, he was out from the shadow.

He headed what was officially called the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, better known everywhere as the Truman Committee. He had proposed its creation to expose waste, inefficiency and profiteering in the war effort, and he quickly proved himself extraordinarily effective. Even the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which had scorned him for years as a Pendergast stooge, praised him now as "one of the most useful... forthright and fearless" of all members of the Senate. Time put "Investigator Truman" on its cover and wrote of his "unexpected talents." (If the Pendergast machine had produced Truman, concluded the editors of Time, then perhaps democracy had not been so badly served after all.) A panel of journalists voted him one of the 10 men who had contributed most to the war effort in all fields, and he was the only one who was a member of Congress.

By 1944, the Truman Committee had saved an estimated $15 billion and many thousands of American lives.

Truman was 60 when he became Vice President. He had not as yet held an office of great power, it is true. Nor had he made any money to speak of. But again and again he had turned setbacks into positive accomplishments. The boy who couldn't go to college became a lifelong student of history. The boy who was turned down by West Point became a model battlefield officer. The failed businessman met his debts so  honorably that it is still talked about in and around Kansas City. The man who was first dismissed in Washington as "the Senator from Pendergast" became one of the prominent figures in the wartime Senate and in the Democratic Party. (Otherwise

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Roosevelt never would have picked him as a running mate.) All in all, it had been no little man's career.

When Truman took office following Roosevelt's death in 1945, a typical reaction was that of White House staff member Jonathan Daniels, who was there the first morning the new President took his place behind FDR's big desk. To Daniels, Truman seemed "tragically inadequate... almost sacrilegiously small." To the country at large, too, the twanging new voice coming over the radio, so thin and stained compared to Roosevelt's, was hardly reassuring.

But Truman grew in office. His first years, 1946 and 1947, weren't so good; he often looked unsure and inept. It wasn't until 1948 and his famous "whistlestop" campaign that he found his "voice," the style we think of as typically Truman. He put aside the prepared speeches and spoke straight from the shoulder in his own words-to such effect that he won re-election, defeating the urbane, confident Thomas E. Dewey in the biggest political upset in our history.

Few of Harry Truman's decisions as President were easy. Some had consequences reaching to our own day. He decided to use the atomic bomb to end the war with Japan. He launched the Marshall Plan, ordered the Berlin airlift. He supported the creation of Israel, started the CIA. He sent the first civil rights message ever to Congress and, with Executive Order 9981, he did away with segregation in the armed services. He drew the line against Communist expansion in Korea and, when his commander in the field, Douglas MacArthur, chose to disregard his orders, he fired him. He became a force on the world stage, so that The Wall Street Journal could write after his death in 1972 that "it grows increasingly hard to remember what Harry Truman did wrong, and increasingly hard to dispute that he did most of the big things right." Many Americans agreed with that assessment.

"Harry Truman has a lot of stuff, more stuff, I think, than he is generally credited with. He has been called the average American, but he is better than average." The writer was a Washington columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch named Charles Ross and, on hearing of Roosevelt's death that April afternoon in 1945, he had gone to his typewriter to put down what he knew and felt about the new President.

What makes Ross' views of particular interest is that he had been a boyhood friend of Truman's in Missouri and valedictorian of their high school class. Later, he would become Truman's White House press secretary. He knew Truman to be honest, amiable, stubborn when he made his mind up, genuinely modest. He also knew the Republic to be in no danger from the accession of Harry Truman. He would measure up, Ross was confident. He had always been one "to rise to his responsibilities."
[[/Parade magazine article]]

PAGE 6 . MAY 6, 1984 . PARADE MAGAZINE

[[news article]]
By Irving Wallace,
David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace

[[image - black & white photograph of an aircraft carrier]]
[[caption]] U.S.S. Sable, 1943: Navy pilots learned to land on the converted luxury ship [[/caption]]

Paddle-Wheel Aircraft Carriers

During World War II, the U.S. Navy operated two paddle-wheel aircraft carriers.

They were actually former luxury ships. One, the Seeandbee, originally was put into commission in 1913. For years, the 500-foot-long steamer was one of the most sumptuous passenger ships on the Great Lakes, with 510 mahogany-paneled staterooms, a grand lobby and a ballroom. The other ship was the Greater Buffalo, 518 feet long.

In 1942, the U.S. Navy purchased the Seeandbee and the Greater Buffalo and rechristened them the U.S.S. Wolverine and the U.S.S. Sable, respectively. Each was stripped of its upper deck, fitted with a flight deck and tower, and put into service on Lake Michigan to train pilots for combat aircraft carrier duty.

Although the strange-looking flat-tops never left Lake Michigan, they figured importantly in the war effort, as 17,820 pilots made practice landings on their sooty decks. After the war, both ships were sold for scrap.
- Idea submitted by George Konrad, West Peabody, Mass.
[[/news article]]

[[article]]
First Person Launched in a Spacecraft

The first person launched in a spacecraft was an American woman-and a dead one at that.

She was Margaret (Maggie) McGrew, a missile engineering executive at Patrick Air Force Base, Fla., in the early years of spaceflight development and one of the first women to achieve career success in missile research. McGrew died in January 1956 at age 46. Her body was cremated, and the remains were shipped to the Boeing plant in California. There, in accordance with her wishes, friends sealed the ashes into the nose cone of a new Bomarc missile.

The missile was launched that spring at Cape Canaveral, and the lift-off went flawlessly. It exploded at 40,000 feet, however, scattering McGrew's ashes over the Atlantic. Still, it secured her place as the first person-in the opinion of her friends-to be launched in a spacecraft.

It wasn't until 1961-five years later-that Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight qualified him as the first man in space. The first living woman to make the trip? Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who was launched into orbit in 1963.
- Idea submitted by Brad Whitacre, Melbourne, Fla.
[[/article]]

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