And that seems to be the theme not only of his presidency but of his life. Over the past few days I watched a very long documentary about the only person my home state has ever sent to the presidency and throughout the experience my main response was to ask myself, who knows? It’s kind of embarrassing to know so little about Truman – I’m not saying that dropping atomic bombs is a minor thing, of course, but there’s so much more. I had no idea that Harry Truman stepped into the presidency when Roosevelt died. I had no idea that Harry Truman was the one who put some meat on the bones of the cold war. With World War II over, the country needed some fear, he said, the country needed a common enemy. He certainly found one. I had no idea that he’d taken the first presidential stab at civil rights, or that he’d desegregated the armed services. His stance on race relations, in fact, prompted some of the southern states to walk out of the convention that nominated him and form their own party, the Dixiecrats. As I was watching this I wondered, of course, what it would be like if people like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were capable of taking action in such a clear manner. I’m not saying that Truman believed that blacks and whites were equal – there is substantial evidence that he did not – but you’ve got to give the guy a point or two for willing to be unpopular.
What I wondered most of all is if Harry was a homo. He was openly referred to as a sissy. He was quite the piano player. He never had girlfriends, focusing instead on the mannish, hopelessly frumpy Bess. He excelled during the first world war, in close quarters with the guys, lots of guys, lots of young guys. In an era when people bred like livestock, the Trumans issued forth exactly one offspring. Even though I didn’t witness it personally, I got kind of nostalgic when I learned that Bess and Harry didn’t actually live at the White House together. She spent almost all of her time in Missouri, with her mother. She was afraid, so the story goes, that the press would find out that her father had committed suicide, which would have humiliated her mother. Harry wrote her long, adoring letters from Washington. He even wrote her when he vacationed, alone … in Key West. Can you imagine how this sort of arrangement would be received today?
Had I been alive and of age at the time, I would have voted for Truman even if we weren’t from the same state. That’s because the opponent had already been declared the winner, and who among us really likes to be told by people like Amy Walter how we’re going to vote before we even have a ballot in our hands? Harry Truman, according to the conventional wisdom, had no hope of winning the election because he was just a plainspoken, simple man from Missouri. Uh-huh. What I find most admirable about Harry Truman was that he fired Douglas MacArthur, the Oliver North of the day. He knew this would cost him what’s called ‘political capital’ today, and it did. In perfect keeping with our ongoing adoration of anything and everything uniform related, there were endless parades for the heroic MacArthur, and shortly thereafter, in an election in which Truman did not participate, the U.S.A. installed a general as president. After seven years on the job, Harry Truman handed over the keys to the White House and rode a train back to Missouri, where he was surprised, as legend has it, that anyone at all showed up to welcome him home.
