The Life and Times of Harry S. Truman

Few politicians have suffered more from the vagaries of public opinion than Harry S. Truman. By the time he left the White House in 1952 he had been repudiated by the public and abandoned by his own party. The combined weight of an unpopular war in Korea, the firing of the popular General Douglas MacArthur, and public anxiety about corruption and communism at the highest levels of government had crushed public faith in Truman’s leadership. Less than a quarter of the public approved of the way he handled his job. Throughout the year, polls showed him trailing the likely Republican nominee, General Dwight Eisenhower, by wide margins. Fearing that an angry electorate would punish them in the 1952 presidential election for Truman’s blunders, Democratic Party leaders searched for a candidate with few ties to the administration.

Less than a half-century later, however, Truman has emerged as a popular hero to most Americans. Politicians of both parties invoke his name to rally public support behind their cause. Historians rank him among the most successful presidents in history. Why the dramatic change? To a large extent, events that followed Truman’s departure from public life shaped perceptions of his presidency. The social experimentation of the 1960s made many people long for Truman’s practical liberalism. The emergence of an imperial presidency and the development of modern media campaigns that emphasize style over substance made people nostalgic for the folksy, salty-tongued man from Missouri. Finally, the end of the Cold War and the demise of communism produced a new appreciation for the wisdom of Truman’s controversial containment policy.

The Truman revival received a big boost in 1992 with the publication of David McCullough’s best-selling biography, Truman. McCullough described a man of ordinary weaknesses and extraordinary strengths who succeeded because of his simple faith in the wisdom of the American people. “He stood for common sense, common decency,” McCullough concluded (p. 941). In 1994, Robert Ferrell added his authoritative voice to the discussion, declaring that Truman “was the right man for his time” (Harry S. Truman: A Life, p. xi).

Alonzo Hamby’s magisterial account of Truman’s life and legacy adds new dimensions to our understanding of the nation’s thirty-eighth president. “I have sought to demythologize him, but not to debunk him,” he says (p. viii). The image of Truman that emerged from other accounts is that of a tough talking, no-nonsense chief executive who strides confidently across the world stage, shaping events with his iron will. Hamby paints a more nuanced portrait of an insecure man, uncomfortable with personal confrontation, who vented his anger in private letters that he never mailed. Truman was a politician torn between two worlds, forced to reconcile conflicting values in American thought. At home, he needed to adapt his Jeffersonian faith to the reality of a large and intrusive national government. Politically, he struggled, often in vain, to tailor the New Deal coalition to the demands of postwar prosperity. Abroad, he fought to sustain his instinctive idealism in the face of Soviet aggression. “He was,” Hamby writes, “an archetypical American democrat—reared by a family of middling status within a community that professed egalitarian ideals, compelled to define his own identity in a fluid society” (p. 635).

Hamby harvests a vast array of sources to present a vivid picture of Truman’s early years. Born in 1884, he spent most of his youth in rural Missouri. His poor eyesight, which forced him to wear thick glasses, prevented him from participating in rough sports. Truman was self-conscious about his appearance, describing himself at one point as “a guy with spectacles and a girl mouth” (p. 33). Years later, in a rare moment of candor, he told a group of students, “I was kind of a sissy” (p. 3). Unable to participate in boyhood activities, Truman spent much of his time at the...