Truman Harry S. - Citizen soldier: a life of Harry S. Truman

Table of Contents

Aida Donald has written a succinct and gripping life of one of our most remarkable presidents, marked in particular by an original and highly engaging portrait of Truman as a young man. Truman took more than forty years to discover his real vocation, yet left an enduring mark on the nation and the world.

David Kaiser, author of
The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy

Citizen Soldier rivetingly reveals Truman the man and what shaped himhis family and his wife, battlefield service in World War I, and entanglements with the politics of the Pendergast machine. Donald judiciously takes the measure of his presidency while recounting how the inner man coped with the burden of his momentous decisions, from the atomic bombing of Japan to the waging of war in Korea. A moving and insightful biography.

Daniel J. Kevles, Stanley Woodward
Professor of History, Yale University

Aida Donald has brought a keen focus back on Harry Truman the person. Not so much a policy tome, this is about the interior life of a decent, seemingly ordinary persona kind of real life Mr. Smithfinding himself drawn more and more to the center of a very messy political world. The more we recognize Truman as a common man, the more we recognize in him a bit of ourselves, the more we appreciate the way he learns and copes with choices, great and terrible, that marked an age. Donald wears her deep knowledge lightly; her portraiture is swift yet thoughtful.

Philip Zelikow, Associate Dean for the
Graduate School & White Burkett Miller
Professor of History, University of Virginia

A skillful psychobiography by an empathetic scholar.

ALSO BY AIDA D. DONALD

Lion in the White House: A Life of Theodore Roosevelt
John F. Kennedy and the New Frontier (Editor)

In May 2011, in an interview, Condoleezza Rice, recent Republican Secretary of State, stated: Harry Truman probably is the greatest president to my mind of the postWorld War II era. Dr. Rice was undoubtedly referring to Trumans putting the world back together again after the most devastating war in the modern era. Through economic and military action, he saved then revived Europe and Japan. A Soviet expert, she also must have had in mind that Truman mostly stopped the spread of communism from a powerful and dictatorial Soviet Union.

Trumans reputation was not always so high. While he received an 82 percent approval rating at the end of World War II, it sank to almost half that a year later, and fell even further during the Korean War to 23 percent. More important, when he left office he was considered a failed president, or second rate. He was not ranked with those midgets Pierce, Buchanan, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, and a few others. But he was far below the greats. Only recently has his reputation risen to a high level, below Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, and the two Roosevelts, to be sure, but near the nineteenth-century figure of Andrew Jackson. Time has shown the strength of character he possessed and the wisdom to govern well during many crises.

Splendid biographies by David McCullough, Alonzo Hamby, Robert J. Donovan, and Robert Ferrell have surely boosted Trumans reputation. Dozens of specialized books; documents in the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri; the opening up of hitherto-secret archives there and in Washington; and the extraordinary access to significant materials through the Internet throw light on his various endeavors and political offices to give us a deepened view of his times and life. Those of us who attempt to write a life of Truman, especially one that is short and interpretative, stand on the shoulders of all these giants and are greatly in debt to archivists work. I am one of these immensely indebted to previous historians and keepers of records, whom I have not only come to admire but also to hold in affectionate regard.

Like other Truman biographers, I have struggled to figure out where I stand on the puzzling issues of Trumans life. I am more inclined to interpret Trumans life psychologically than other biographers of the president. In the pages that follow, I stress the powerful and opposing tugs at him by his father and mother when he was a young man, after what he called an idyllic childhood. But the family was always on the move, and his college-educated mother raised him to read, play the piano, and love music, plays, and opera. And she put up with her often-improvident husband with his many business failures. Truman left a promising life and career in a bank in Kansas City, Missouri, where he reveled in the high culture of the place, when ordered home by his father to help run the family farm. The young man was unhappy for ten years in the lonely, desperate work to make the farm prosper, with no, or little, success.

Truman ran away from the farm and its isolation and drudgery to volunteer in the army in 1917, and it became a landmark decision in his life. I stress the importance of Trumans World War I soldiering, when he was an excellent officer who molded a wild bunch of men into a fighting artillery battery that came to admire him. His initiatives under fire, outside his sector, saved others lives, but such actions sometimes brought threats of court-martial by stiff-necked colonels, although General John J. Pershing praised his battery, as will be shown. The war made Truman the man he dreamed of becoming when a shy, bespectacled boy, who mostly played with girl cousins and learned the art of cooking and babysitting from his mother, all of which made him a sissy (his word).

Trumans love for and devotion to Bess Truman, from age six, is woven into the story. She was a polestar in his life, although she hardly noticed him for years, and perhaps her unavailability for so long was a challenge, as well as a safety net, to his growing manhood. The Victorian-Edwardian era, as well as the previous Romantic period, made much of men loving the unobtainable as a hedge against a known inability to connect with young women. When Harry went to Washington, Bess appears as less than the loving helpmate Truman needed. She preferred to live in Independence with her mother for half of every year, even though Harry desperately needed her during periods of turmoil in his political career. Their daughter, Mary Margaret, called Margaret, was the object of his total affection, which she reciprocated.

The real puzzles of Trumans career were what made me want to tell his story. Although the corrupt Kansas City Pendergast political machine drew him into politics, how did he manage to stay honest in such a den of thieves? I offer a psychological interpretation to explain this phase of his lifea local politician in charge of millions of dollars for development in Jackson County, as county judge, an administrative position in Missouri. My portrait is immeasurably aided by a new reading of the memos of the once-secret Pickwick Papers in the Truman Library. Truman often had to make deals with corrupt politicians, but they made him very ill with blinding headaches and stomach problems. He hid out in hotels, and it was there he wrote the Pickwick letters/memos, named for the Kansas City hotel he chose most often as a hideaway, about his dubious political actions, and he named those who were skimming taxpayer monies. Long hidden, the Pickwick Papers have been made available only recently to biographers, but only I read them for psychological insight. Mostly they have been used to track the corruption Truman found in government and revealed in these memos and letters he kept secret. But he saved them for posterity, for they could exculpate him from charges of major fraud, while revealing the local history he was a part of. He believed in the power of truth in history.