Blackwell Companions to American History: A Companion to Harry S. Truman ed. by Daniel S. Margolies (review)

A Companion to Harry Truman (ACHT) aims to provide an overview of scholarship that situates the Truman administration’s policies and their long-term impact, as well as Harry Truman the man and politician himself, within U.S. and world history. In this regard, it has much to offer, with a series of 27 chapters written by eminent scholars, mostly historians and a few political scientists.

Part I, “Considering Truman in Historical Perspective,” contains one chapter that examines Truman’s role in historical, popular, and political memory and another that discusses Truman’s leadership. In Part II, “Enduring Questions,” ACHT covers realist, revisionist, and post-revisionist explanations of the Cold War; Truman’s decision to use the nuclear bomb; and U.S. versus international accounts of the origins of the Cold War. Part III on “Truman, the State, and the World System” reviews foreign economic policy, NSC-68, and the president’s foreign policy advisers, and Part IV details research on domestic matters, such as the Fair Deal, civil defense, and civil rights. In the longest section of ACHT, Part V, the authors discuss research on Truman’s foreign policy, followed by Part VI, which concentrates specifically on Truman’s policy in the postwar Pacific Rim.

ACHT makes several laudable contributions. One strength is that it draws together historical research, both old and new, into one comprehensive volume, particularly scholarship based on archives and perspectives from countries other than the United States. In addition, although ACHT’s omission of a chapter focusing on domestic anti-Communism is puzzling, the book commendably includes topics that are frequently glossed over—Mark Harvey’s fine chapter on the environmental history of the Truman years is an example—or offers insights into the complexities of issues the administration faced, such as how officials grappled with the issue of segregation when making civil defense plans that would send refugees from northeastern cities to rural areas of the South. Editor Daniel S. Margolies intends each chapter to stand alone, which leads to some unavoidable repetition, particularly on the matter of orthodox versus revisionist versus post-revisionist perspectives. However, such themes are integral to understanding much of the scholarship on Truman, and Amanda Kay McVety does an especially nice job in giving an overview of these frames.

Despite these strengths, two weaknesses are also very much in evidence, both of which relate to words. First, both Sean J. Savage and Steven Casey seem to accept Merle Miller’s Plain Speaking at face value as though it were an authoritative account of Truman’s words, but historian Robert H. Ferrell and political scientist Francis H. Heller long ago compared the tapes of the Truman interviews with Miller’s book to conclude that Miller distorted and even fabricated much of what he presented as true. (See Robert H. Ferrell and Francis H. Heller, “Plain Faking?” American Heritage, Vol. 46, No. 3, May/June 1995, pp. 21-33.)

ACHT also frequently ignores or underplays the large body of rhetorical research that exists on the Cold War generally and Truman specifically. As a scholar of rhetoric, I am admittedly partial to such perspectives, but my critique here stems in part from the fact that ACHT regularly purports to deal with rhetoric. Benjamin A. Coates’s chapter, “Strategists and Rhetoricians: Truman’s Foreign Policy Advisers,” mentions historian Frank Costigliola’s study of George Kennan’s language but does not mention the work of communication scholar Robert Ivie, specifically his essay “Realism Masking Fear: George F. Kennan’s Political Rhetoric,” in Francis A. Beer and Robert Hariman, eds., Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996), pp. 55-74. Moreover, Coates generally discusses rhetoric in superficial ways. Casey, to his credit, cites relevant scholarship in his chapter, “Rhetoric and Style of Truman’s Leadership,” but he also sometimes overlooks other insights that the very...