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Americans today seem to believe that we live in especially exhausting political times. But the rhythms of our moment—pandemic, protest, pandemic, election, insurrection, pandemic, invasion of Ukraine—have nothing on the Truman era. Between April, 1945, when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death thrust Harry S. Truman into office, and January, 1953, when Truman handed the Presidency to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the war in Europe ended, Hitler killed himself, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, the Cold War began, the state of Israel came into being, the Soviet Union developed its own nuclear weapons, China underwent a Communist revolution, the West created NATO, the world created the United Nations, and the Korean War began. One could go on.
How much Truman shaped these events, and how much he was buffeted by them, is the puzzle at the heart of Jeffrey Frank’s new book, “The Trials of Harry S. Truman: The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945-1953” (Simon & Schuster). Truman was the ultimate accidental President, a pipsqueak senator from Independence, Missouri, who had been Vice-President for less than three months when Roosevelt died. Once Truman assumed office, global events seemed to proceed according to their own logic and momentum. Truman inherited daunting challenges, and he borrowed other men’s visions in order to meet them. His own accomplishments occurred somewhere in between.
Truman acknowledged that he didn’t have much choice about whether to drop the bombs. “As a practical matter,” Frank notes, the decision “had been made for him.” Truman’s greatest foreign-policy triumph, the European Recovery Program, is credited to the military giant and Secretary of State George Marshall; we don’t call it the Truman Plan. As President, Truman was accused of “losing” China, but China was, of course, never really his to lose. And it was Senator Joseph McCarthy, more than Truman, who defined the political tenor of the era.
Perhaps Truman’s most significant act as President was his decision to enter and then stick with the war in Korea. Although that conflict was never the political disaster that Vietnam turned out to be, it killed millions, often with shocking brutality. The South was effectively recaptured in the first few months; the long, blood-drenched impasse that ensued accomplished little. On the home front, Truman’s dream of achieving universal health care languished as well. After a bruising battle with the American Medical Association and the Republican Party, he ended up more or less where he started.
So why write a big new book on Truman? And what to do with him as the protagonist? Frank depicts Truman as a limited talent who was promoted above his pay grade. “It’s hell to be President of the Greatest Most Powerful Nation on Earth,” Truman complained in his diary. All the same, Truman did the best he could—an “ordinary man,” in Frank’s formulation, who ended up with an “extraordinary presidency.” Whether he made history or just endured it, Truman was, as Secretary of State Dean Acheson later put it, “present at the creation” of many of the key institutions that still shape both American and global politics.
A former New Yorker editor and the author of three novels set in Washington, Frank is drawn to the human side of this story: the backroom sniping, the jockeying for position, the personality clashes, and the diplomatic pageantry that produced the postwar world order. Famous statesmen abound, most of them more confident, if not more lovable, than Truman. The great and grave George Marshall ordered colleagues to “avoid trivia,” while Truman loved nothing more than chitchat, poker, and fried chicken with pals. Acheson intoned about ancient Athens and Sparta and Rome, while Truman, a self-proclaimed plain-talking Midwesterner, was apt to compare Stalin to Tom Pendergast, the Democratic boss of Kansas City. General Douglas MacArthur, the hero of the Pacific theatre and the American potentate of Japanese reconstruction, exuded far more gravitas than the President—and everyone knew it. “MacArthur is brilliant, theatrical, stern, eloquent, usually unapproachable,” a Herald Tribune reporter wrote in 1950. “The President is plodding, stubborn, undramatic, shrewd and earthy.” When Truman journeyed all the way to Wake Island for a brief meeting with MacArthur, an observer likened the President to “an insurance salesman who has at last signed up an important prospect.”
Frank mostly wants us to side with Truman, whose Everyman pragmatism often put him at odds with men who thought that they were better than he was and who sought to give him advice. If there was ever a time when the so-called liberal establishment had real force, it was in the nineteen-forties, as a fast-expanding executive branch brought thousands of credentialled know-it-alls to Washington. Sometimes to his detriment, often to his credit, Truman did not fit in. Frank writes, “He was, inescapably, someone who’d stepped out of the nation’s rural past and found himself in a dizzying mid-twentieth-century world, like a character from a Mark Twain fable: A Missouri Farmer in FDR’s Court.” Frank’s Truman is a populist in the best sense of the word: not a demagogue but a true man of the people.
Unlike many current aspirants, Truman came by that label honestly. He grew up in a small town, and didn’t graduate from college. He worked as a farmer and then struggled as a haberdasher, not exactly the tried-and-true power track. Perhaps his proudest achievement, before entering politics, was persuading Elizabeth Virginia Wallace, his Sunday-school classmate from a well-off family, to accept his offer of marriage. Bess Truman, as she came to be known, plays a major role in “The Trials of Harry S. Truman,” though largely by way of absence. As President, Truman spent a surprising amount of time moping around the White House and writing winsome, reflective letters to his wife, who sensibly preferred Missouri to Washington.
The best-known portrait of Truman as man, husband, and father is still David McCullough’s 1992 biography, “Truman.” In that book, McCullough rescued Truman from the sneers of prior generations. Like much of the mid-century establishment, early Presidential historians tended to dismiss Truman as a second-rater, beholden to heartland America’s small minds and small visions. McCullough turned that Midwestern pluck into a virtue—just what was needed to cut through the moral and political complexities of an epically confusing historical moment. Ivy League types, he maintained, had nothing on good old common sense.
Frank adopts a similar, if more nuanced, view. Near the end of “The Trials of Harry S. Truman,” he pays homage to McCullough’s “masterful” book. At the same time, he acknowledges that Truman’s unschooled, salt-of-the-earth pose was not always what the moment called for. From the bully pulpit, Truman could occasionally reach great heights of rhetoric. At least as frequently, he put his foot in his mouth. “I need not tell you that Harry Truman is not an orator,” a Senate colleague once noted, upon introducing a Truman speech. “He can demonstrate that for himself.”
Frank’s book describes press conferences in which Truman managed to say precisely the wrong thing at the wrong time. In 1946, for instance, he nearly turned the Cold War hot by championing Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech—which was delivered in Fulton, Missouri—without thinking through the implications. Stalin interpreted Churchill’s words as “a call to war with the Soviet Union.” Truman had to scramble to explain that this was not, in fact, what the United States wanted.
The wise men around Truman got tripped up less often—though, to be fair, they were less often put on the spot. If Truman had a major strength as a chief executive, it was his ability to comprehend and synthesize the learned views of his many advisers and experts, even if the result sometimes served their interests better than his own. Adopting the formulation of the redoubtable George Kennan, the Truman Doctrine argued that the United States needed to contain an aggressive and expansionist Soviet Union, lest the world end up with another totalitarian blitzkrieg across Europe. It was as powerful a grand strategic vision as any President has ever offered. It also led inexorably to calls for a bigger and better security state—which would require still more expert opinion from still more advisers like Kennan.
Drawing on such ideas, Truman presided over a vast transformation of the American security establishment, including the creation of the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the C.I.A. He also helped to bring about the desegregation of an empowered and permanently mobilized American military. Dwight Eisenhower would balefully dub these powerful new institutions the “military-industrial complex”; he warned that they might come to dominate American society. Truman worried less about their existential significance. He took office in a moment of crisis, and the crises never stopped. The big new bureaucracies were mainly just efforts to cope.
The problem of the Soviet Union—what it was, how it worked, what its leaders wanted—occupied more of Truman’s time and thought than anything else. From his first moments in office, Truman viewed the Russians with two-fisted suspicion, ever ready to take and give offense. He got “very snappy” around Stalin, in the words of Secretary of State James Byrnes—and proudly so. “I reared up on my hind legs and told ’em where to get off and they got off,” he wrote home to Bess from the 1945 Potsdam negotiations. Frank’s book does not try to answer the hoary question of who started the Cold War—whether Stalin or Truman or maybe even Churchill was really to blame. It does show that they were all mostly feeling their way in the dark, relying not so much on a ruthless calculus of power as on leaps of instinct and imagination.
The early Cold War found its domestic analogue in McCarthyism, a term that both illuminates and obscures the political dynamics of the Truman years. It was Truman, not McCarthy, who introduced a loyalty program for federal employees. But McCarthy, far more than Truman, put his stamp on the anti-Communist Zeitgeist. When McCarthy announced, in February, 1950, that “I have in my hand” a list of Communists lurking in the State Department, he was attacking Truman’s foreign policy: How could the United States have allowed the Soviets to build a bomb and the Communists to take over China, if not for some act of internal treachery?
McCarthy’s example points up some of the contradictions of the Truman era, and of the politics that limited Truman’s range of action. Today, the postwar years are often seen as a time of bipartisan coöperation and good will, when the Marshall Plan passed by an overwhelming majority, Republicans and Democrats regularly conferred in Washington cloakrooms, and intellectual giants like Kennan bestrode the State Department’s new Policy Planning Staff. It was also an era of vicious, operatic partisanship. McCarthy denounced Truman as soft on Communism, Marshall as a tool of Soviet masters. Truman could give almost as good as he got. “I think the greatest asset the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy,” he declared during a 1950 press conference. Just imagine what they would have done with Twitter.
Although he could punch back when needed, Truman often kept his most cutting views to himself. Throughout his Presidency, he made a practice of writing caustic letters to his enemies and critics, then tucking them away unsent, steam effectively blown off. Frank recognizes a precious gift to the biographer: a subject who, miraculously and generously, takes the time to write down his innermost feelings and thoughts.
The letters invite counterfactual speculation: What if Truman had sent them? What if he had actually uttered the words out loud? Sometimes it might have been just what the country needed. Truman privately worried that J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. wanted to become an American “Gestapo.” But although Truman engaged in some backroom wrangling with Hoover, he never tried to fire him or hold the F.B.I. to much public account.
Frank’s book is filled with other might-have-beens. Nuclear power might have ended up under military control; radioactive waste might have been deployed as a weapon; the Korean War might have expanded into China. On the domestic front, Truman might have lost the 1948 election, thus making the Chicago Tribune’s famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline a statement of fact rather than a symbol of bad polling. For all the things that happened during Truman’s Presidency, Frank argues, the events that were averted deserve to be part of the historical discussion, too. Above all, the world did not descend into a nuclear-armed Third World War, a prospect that loomed over every minute of Truman’s Presidency and pervades every page of Frank’s book. That may have been Truman’s greatest accomplishment.
In the nearly seventy years since Truman left office, the institutions that he helped to create have had remarkable staying power. naTO, despite repeated challenges to its relevance, endures as the critical military pact of the Western world. Japan and Germany, with the help of American reconstruction funds, developed into prosperous, stable democracies. Even the U.N. is still limping along—not exactly the great peacemaking body of postwar ambitions but certainly more lasting than its predecessor, the League of Nations.
And yet many of today’s most combustible conflicts can be traced back to Truman’s moment as well. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has cited nato expansion as one justification for the war in Ukraine—and it is NATO (b. 1949) that is preparing to mobilize against him. There is talk of a “new Cold War” with China and of the clarifying if dread-laden politics that it might produce—with Taiwan (also b. 1949) as the up-and-coming hot spot. The dictatorship of North Korea, consolidated in part through Truman’s land war, continues to embrace nuclear-weapons development (also very Truman). In outlets such as Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs, insiders wring their hands over the possible collapse of the “liberal international order,” by which they mean the complex of institutions—NATO, the World Bank, the U.N.—erected in the great world-remaking experiments of the nineteen-forties.
Donald Trump, as a candidate and then as President, helped to fuel anxieties that the postwar order was done for at last. Joe Biden has since tried to shore it up, with the help of appointees who would like nothing more than to go down in history as the twenty-first century’s Kennan or Acheson or Marshall. Politically, too, Biden is a bit like Truman: a decent sort, thrust into office at a moment of crisis, and subject to his own foot-in-mouth problems. Like Truman, Biden is facing a Republican Party in thrall to a demagogue. Whether consciously or not, Trump owes much of his big-lie political style to Truman’s great adversary, McCarthy. And Biden, like Truman before him, has been unable to fully dislodge it.
On the whole, though, Republicans and Democrats sort themselves differently from the way they did in Truman’s day. Back then, each party contained a mishmash of views, both liberal and conservative, in contrast with today’s rigid ideological divisions. On the Democratic side, Franklin Roosevelt’s winning coalition stitched together several seemingly incompatible constituencies: liberal élites, industrial workers, the white “Solid South,” and a small but growing number of Black voters. That coalition started to fracture under Truman, when the Southern Democrats (or Dixiecrats) broke away from the Party, with South Carolina’s governor, Strom Thurmond, as their standard-bearer. Sixteen years later, Thurmond became one of the first Southern Democrats of national stature to make the leap over to the Republican Party.
A son of border-state Missouri, Truman actually shared many of the Dixiecrats’ racist views. “The Trials of Harry S. Truman” quotes him using the N-word more than once, and notes that he did not believe in interracial marriage or social equality. Frank is inclined to explain Truman, though, rather than cancel him. “Truman was a man with casual prejudices, some that he tried to rid himself of and some that he simply couldn’t,” Frank writes. Indeed, Truman rose above his raising to champion an ambitious racial-justice agenda. His Committee on Civil Rights, created in 1946 following a surge in white-supremacist violence, came out in support of an anti-lynching law, voting rights for Black Americans, and a more robust system of federal enforcement.