| Man of Action, Son of
a Bitch
Harry
S. Truman was a man of action. Though very intelligent, he found
deeds far more rewarding than words, and made his mark in the world not
with his pen but with his head. Unsuited for business, he stuck his
head up after WWI and attracted the attention of one of the nation’s most
famous machine politicians. As a senator, he would later stick it
with great effect into the business of the nation’s war producers.
His head, ever cool, would see him through the shock of becoming President,
the negotiations at Potsdam and the momentous decision to use atomic weapons
on civilian populations. In 1948, he used his rock-hard skull to
plow through weeks on end of campaign appearances, undeterred by fatigue,
lack of funds or those (and there were many) who predicted certain defeat.
Harry Truman, in the words of one of his closest cronies, was “one tough
son of a bitch of a man,” and he had one tough son of a bitch of a head.
Truman’s
hard-headedness is one of the most powerful recurring themes in his life.
Although his lack of guile and eminent sense of fair play played significant
roles, his will and determination were perhaps the most important factors
in shaping his legacy -- a legacy that finally broke America of its irrational
isolationism, gave it a lasting sense of optimism and reinforced the dual
creeds of can-do frontier spirit and canny Yankee ingenuity.
Examples
of his determination and drive abound, though his early life is perhaps
not the best place to look. Famously, he failed as a haberdasher
just after his return from WWI, where he served with distinction in an
artillery battalion. Had he not given up, he might never have made
it into politics. His early political career was characterized by
campaigns of endurance, as he crisscrossed Missouri trying to muster voters
in campaigns for judgeships and other minor offices. Still, he had
as good as given up again in 1934, when the Pendergast machine passed him
over for a Congressional race. “I thought ... that retirement on
a virtual pension in some minor county office was all that was in store
for me,” he wrote resignedly.
Unexpectedly
tapped for a Senate race, he won against significant odds -- propelling
him onto the national scene, where his determination soon proved the key
to his prominence.
Truman took on the nascent
military-industrial complex -- then virtually unscrutinized -- looking
for waste and graft. With the delicacy of a bull and the tenacity
of a pit bull, Truman and the committee he led saved the nation an estimated
$15 billion dollars. Journalists praised him as “one of the most
useful and at the same time one of the most forthright and fearless of
the ninety-six” senators in office. No amount of dissembling could
dissuade him, no spin throw him off -- with the exception of the Manhattan
Project, which he knowingly let slide.
Truman’s
election alongside Roosevelt as Vice-President came after a campaign reminiscent
of his Missouri days, a campaign more arduous than the incumbent President
had the strength to conduct and a campaign that would foreshadow his future
marathon stumping sessions. Truman supported Roosevelt to the point
of self-effacement, speaking to crowds as small as three and as large as
fifty thousand on the President’s behalf. In private, he continued
showed signs of his unabashed honesty, telling one man his sole objection
to Roosevelt was that “he lies.”
When he
became President, hours after Roosevelt’s death was announced, Truman would
draw on all his reserves of cool-headedness to steady himself and the country
for the remainder of the war. He pushed relentlessly for what he
saw as America’s interests, shocking diplomats and fellow statesmen with
his decidedly undiplomatic bluntness. When a railroad strike paralyzed
the country, he lashed out decisively, threatening to draft the railroad
workers en masse to bring them back to work. He dismissed Russian
Foreign Minister Molotov brusquely from the White House on his twelfth
day in office and would be just as curt with Winston Churchill and Josef
Stalin at Potsdam: “I don’t want to discuss,” he said at the end of the
first day of negotiations, “I want to decide.” His final decision
to use the atomic bomb on Japan, though deliberated long and hard, was
equally abrupt. “Suggestion approved. Release when ready but
not sooner than August 2.”
No episode
in Truman’s life, though, better illustrates the reality of his head as
the driving force behind his nature than the campaign of ‘48. Truman
drove himself and his staff on in the face of almost universal agreement
that his candidacy was hopeless. He believed, every second of the
long, long whistle-stop campaign across all of America, that he was not
only right but that he was going to win. He let his true nature shine,
and though he was far from eloquent, he lit a fire in the hearts of a people
ready to rest prematurely on their laurels after a long, hard-fought war.
Truman “shook the bones of all the smarties,” said H.L. Mencken.
“Neither candidate made a speech on the stump that will survive in the
schoolbooks, but those of Truman at least had warmth in them ... He made
votes every time he gave a show.”
And he
won. He won not with his pen but with his head, unafraid to dig his
teeth into the issues he saw as important, undaunted by the obstacles his
eyes saw before him, unswayed by the constant discouragement he heard from
press and pollsters. Truman won because he was one tough hard-headed
son of a bitch.
(For an
excellent biography of Harry S.Truman, check out David McCullough's Truman.) |
