Missouri to the White House, the White House to Missouri, Part 2

When the Buck Stops With You: Harry S. Truman on Leadership
by Alan Axelrod

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Prodded by its chairman, the Truman Committee, as it was informally and universally called, was ruthless in holding military officers, civil administrators, and - especially - defense contractors to the highest standards of efficiency, performance, and value for money. Yet Truman was far less interested in punishing poor performers or even outright frauds than in motivating them to deliver what they were supposed to and what they had promised. To that end, the Truman Committee made it a practice to issue draft reports of its findings to the corporations, unions, and government agencies under investigation, thereby inviting voluntary correction of abuses before prosecution was commenced.

Almost always, this proved abundantly persuasive. In one famous instance, on the eve of World War II, Truman challenged aviation manufacturer Glenn Martin to redesign the B-26 bomber after it had gone into production with wings that were simply too short to achieve adequate performance. Worse, the design flaw posed a safety hazard that had already sent several airmen to their deaths. In testimony before the committee, Martin told Truman that the design was already on the boards and in production, so that it was too late to make changes. Truman responded with typical directness that "if the lives of American boys depended upon the planes that were produced for the United States Army Air Force the committee would see to it that no defective ships were purchased." This elicited a single sentence in reply from Martin: "Well, if that's the way you feel about it, we'll change it."

Truman's Senate record made him an attractive candidate for FDR's running mate in his fourth-term campaign of 1944. Truman, however, loved the Senate and had no burning desire to become the nation's vice president. He staunchly resisted the nomination until Roosevelt, desperately seeking an alternative to the current vice president, Henry A. Wallace (perceived as too left wing), and to Office of War Mobilization head James F. Byrnes (too ambitious), angrily insisted. Over the phone, FDR gave Democratic Party worker Robert Hannegan a message for Truman: "You tell the senator that if he wants to break up the Democratic Party in the middle of the war, that's his responsibility." As the bang of a slammed receiver echoed in Hannegan's ear, he relayed the message to Truman verbatim and, as some recalled, the senator uttered only two monosyllables in response: "Oh, shit!" Truman himself remembered a different reply: "Well, if that's the situation, I'll have to say yes."

During the eighty-two days of his service in the Roosevelt administration, Truman met with FDR only twice. The president never formally briefed his vice president, let alone counseled, groomed, or in any way prepared him. Of the existence of the atomic bomb project, for instance, Truman was told absolutely nothing.

And so, on April 12, 1945, Truman's elevation to the presidency came under the worst possible circumstances: under cover of the ignorance in which FDR had kept him and upon the sudden death of a larger-than-life four-term chief executive, the man who had led the nation through the Depression and through the darkest, hardest days of World War II, a leader who came as close to being worshiped by his people as any American president ever has. At Roosevelt's death, victory had been all but completely won in Europe, but the Pacific war raged on. The Missourian found himself thrust among top generals and allied leaders who included the monumental Winston Churchill and the enigmatic Joseph Stalin.

To say that Truman "rose to the occasion" is a pallid understatement. Following a great leader in a time of unparalleled danger, the new president became a great leader in his own right. The decisions he had to make were momentous, world changing, world building, and, potentially, world destroying. Often, his decisions were unpopular. The press - the "sabotage press," Truman sometimes called it - which was overwhelmingly Republican in orientation throughout most of the country, continually sniped at him, one journalist famously quipping, "To err is Truman."

Truman didn't let it matter. He led the nation and made some of the most difficult and important decisions any president has ever made. The first and most famous, of course, was the decision to use the newly developed atomic bomb against Japan, but as consequential as that decision was, Truman later claimed that many others were far harder. Several times in the months and years following the war, he had to go against his own intensely prolabor sympathies to bring the full force of the government to bear in averting or ending coal, rail, and steel strikes that threatened to cripple the nation. In 1948, he had to overcome his own family's Confederate political roots and a white Southerner's heritage of racism to propose and implement the first significant civil rights measures since Reconstruction. That same year, he acted contrary to a number of advisers, including the Cabinet member he most admired, George C. Marshall, in making the United States the first nation to grant official recognition to the new state of Israel. Truman had to lay out a course for the "containment" of expanding Soviet and Chinese Communist aggression - and he had to do so without triggering a cataclysmic third world war. This included ordering the Berlin Airlift of 1948-1949, by which the first major "battle" of the Cold War was won, and conducting a heartbreaking and frustrating "police action" in Korea, resisting the Communist invasion of the democratic south without allowing the conflict to engulf the world.

From the generation that had come of age under Franklin Roosevelt, much had been required indeed. Yet that generation made its sacrifices in light of a vividly clear and ever-present knowledge of the evils it fought. The next generation, under Truman, was faced with a world in some ways even more terrifying, yet fraught with evils far more obscure and ambiguous, the confronting of which required an effort made all the more exhausting precisely because it had, in so many ways, to be continually and carefully restrained. Truman understood that he led a great and victorious nation on the threshold of perhaps even greater achievement. Yet he also understood that he was the first world leader who possessed the power to destroy civilization itself.

Truman was president for all but the first eighty-two days of the fourth term to which Roosevelt had been elected. His chances of getting elected in his own right were reckoned vanishingly slim by just about everyone in 1948 except Truman himself. Feeling that the Republican-dominated press would never give him a fair shake, Truman decided to carry his case directly to the people, and he embarked on a series of cross-country whistle-stop campaign tours of unprecedented duration and extent, traveling 31,700 miles in six weeks and giving 356 speeches. While the pollsters continued to discount the chances of a Truman victory, and some oddsmakers put his chances at 30 to 1, Truman knew he had connected with the people and was supremely confident. In the end, he prevailed over the favored candidate, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, 303 electoral votes to 189, having polled 24,105,812 popular votes to Dewey's 21,970,065.

The next four years were dominated by the Cold War, the Korean War, and an anticommunist hysteria at home that threatened the continued existence of democracy itself. Truman remained steadfast at the helm, and although supporters pleaded with him to run for a second term "in his own right" (a run to which he was entitled, since the Twenty-second Amendment, ratified in 1951 and barring presidents from serving more than two terms, did not apply to the sitting president), Truman declined. While he did not approve of a constitutionally mandated two-term limit, he nevertheless believed that, except in circumstances of extreme emergency, such as those FDR had faced, a president should voluntarily restrict himself to two terms. Any more than that risked dictatorship. His precedent for this self-imposed limit was no less than George Washington and the noble Roman to whom Washington was often compared, Cincinnatus. Washington's popularity was such that he could have been president for life, but after two terms he chose to retire, a private citizen, to his beloved Mount Vernon, much as Cincinnatus had retired to his farm, relinquishing absolute rule over Rome in 458 b.c. after he had completed the job of rescuing his country from the rebellious Aequi.

In July 1945, Harry Truman enjoyed a public approval rating of 87 percent. When he left office in January 1953, his approval rating stood at a meager 31 percent. If this bothered him, he never let on. Polls to the contrary, he knew that he had "done his damnedest," and he devoted the first several years of his retirement to writing two volumes of memoirs and then to feeding his always voracious appetite for the printed word, devouring volumes of history and biography, taking time out for brisk strolls along the streets of his beloved hometown of Independence, Missouri, and maintaining an active interest in the Democratic Party and the conduct of American policy.

With each year that has passed since the end of the Truman presidency, the wisdom and rightness of most of his decisions have become increasingly apparent. Before he died, the day after Christmas 1972, Truman even had the satisfaction of seeing his critical star securely on the rise. Today, despite detractors on the far right and far left, many regard him as among the great presidents of the twentieth century and the greatest of the postwar chief executives. In the long retrospect that is history, his appeal as a leader has become irresistible.

Copyright © 2004 Alan Axelrod. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

Alan Axelrod is a renowned historian and business writer. He is the author of Nothing to Fear: Lessons in Leadership from FDR.