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- 4 - "I SHALL CONTINUE...." After Truman won, the reporter Alistair Cooke, standing below the auditorium at a lunch counter, suddenly heard the voice of the convention chairman say, "Will the next Vice President of the United States come to the rostrum?" He was standing next to a man who had "very shiny glasses, a very pink face, almost an electric blue polka-dot bow tie, and a sky-blue double-breasted suit." The man was holding a paper cup ofCoca-Cola and was about to bite into a hot dog. The voice repeated itself, "Will the next Vice President come to the rostrum? Will Senator Truman come?" The man said, "By golly, that's me!" and dashed off.1 The candidate made an acceptance speech from a sheet on which he had scribbled a mercifully few words: "Honor. I've never had ajob I didn't do with all I have. I shall continue in the new capacity as I have in the U.S. Senate, to help the commander in chief to win the war and save the peace. I have always been a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt in domestic and foreign policy and I shall continue to do just that with everything I have as y'p'''2 Just before the speech, and upon hearing that Truman had won, Helen Douglas promptly fainted. In the general pandemonium fellow Californians helped her off the floor, and Pauley's assistant, Neale Roach, the same who had planned to end the Iowa corn song on Thursday evening by cutting the convention organ's cable with a fire ax, seized Mayor Kelly's car to take her back to her hotel; the driver of the car was one of the mayor's most trusted aides. Mrs. Douglas revived on the way to the Loop and launched into a tirade against Senator Truman, describing him as just another member of the Pendergast machine, a dire reactionary, as typical of boss politics as was Mayor Kelly or Ed Flynn. Every liberal Democrat in the 89 90 Choosing Truman country, she shouted, might as well quit, considering that Truman was in. The driver dropped her at the hotel and hurried back to the stadium to find the convention adjourned and Mayor Kelly fuming, looking for his car. Another man got in with the mayor, and as they went off the driver sought to explain where he had been. He related everything Mrs. Douglas said, and there was a slight silence. The other man happened to be Harry S. Truman.3 Helen Douglas would not have agreed, but in long retrospect it does seem that she had just witnessed an extraordinary convention in which a strong leader managed to convey the presidency to another man ofequal strength. Despite its flaws the American political system could produce wonderfully competent officeholders. Truman was not the perfect politician, as many people observed during his presidency. He had weaknesses in measuring people, especially domestic politicians. He was much better at choosing individuals to conduct foreign and military affairs, even though he could make mistakes in those areas, as in his choice of Byrnes as secretary of state in 1945, or Louis Johnson as secretary of defense in 1949.4 He wrote off criticism as politically inspired, which much of it was, but some was for the good of the country, and he failed to understand that. As his nearly two full terms approached their end he became tired out and made mistakes for that reason. Still, he always acted out of ineradicable faith in the virtues of the American people. He knew no pessimism or cynicism; these qualities that warp judgment were foreign to him. He understood he came from the land of opportunity, for opportunity came to him. All in all he displayed a better mix of political traits than his predecessor, Roosevelt. Like Roosevelt he had a real liking for people and yet combined it with a political realism that, unlike Roosevelt's, was not cold-blooded. Unlike Roosevelt he was open, aboveboard, frank, never secretive or manipulative. A second point about the choice of Truman as Roosevelt's successor has been made by Truman's biographer McCullough, who has written that the boss system, so much maligned, worked well in 1944. He compares it rightly, and critically, with the arrangement of more recent presidential elections whereby candidates are forced to go into state primaries to secure delegates to national conventions, with all that means for homogenization...

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