Truman

August 4, 2025

I put down David McCullough’s 992-page biography of Harry Truman with a deep breath. The final paragraph reports that “he had lived eighty-eight years and not quite eight months. Truman’s wife Bess lived at 219 North Delaware for another ten years. She died there on October 18, 1982 and was buried beside him in the courtyard of the Truman Library.”

The house at 219 North Delaware, Independence, Missouri, is the Truman house. In 1903 Bess Wallace and her mother and brothers moved in with her grandparents after her father committed suicide. When Bess and Harry married they moved in with Bess’s mother. The house was Harry’s Independence home until he died on December 26, 1972 at a Kansas City hospital.

Three years ago we stopped in Independence on our road trip to Wyoming. We camped out after a long day on the interstate. The next morning we visited the Truman Library, for which Truman spent five years raising funds after his one full term as president ended in 1952. The Library was dedicated on July 6, 1957.

The Truman Library is one of America’s wonders. It tells the story of a humble man, born in rural Missouri in 1884, who failed as a farmer, failed as a businessman, did not go to college, yet became one of the nation’s great presidents.

Truman grew up in Independence and Grandview, Missouri. In 1901 he applied for admission to West Point but was rejected because of poor eyesight. His father’s farm failed, he worked trying to save it. He joined the Missouri National Guard, getting in by memorizing the eye-test chart. In World War I he commanded an artillery battery in France, and met a nephew of Tom Pendergast, a Kansas City political boss.

Harry and Bess married in June 1919. A month before the wedding an Army buddy got the idea of opening a men’s clothing store. Harry put up $15,000 by selling farm livestock. The place opened in November. It failed in November 1922, $35,000 in the red. Fifteen years later Harry was still paying off his creditors.

Even before the store closed, Pendergast drafted him to run for election as a judge in Jackson County, although he didn’t have a law license. Harry won and took office on New Year’s Day 1923. In February 1924 Bess’s and Harry’s daughter Margaret was born. Harry was happy.  McCullough writes that “he loved being called ‘Judge.’” 

In 1934, when kingmaker Pendergast looked to back a candidate for U.S. Senator, Harry was his fourth choice. He campaigned hard through 100-degree temperatures of the 1934 summer. Two other Democrats ran in the primary, all three trading charges of corruption and patronage. Truman won. In the general election, in the solid Democratic state he won in a walk. 

In the Senate, after a slow start, Truman made a name for himself heading a committee that investigated fraud in the defense industry. He won reelection in 1940, swept along by President Franklin Roosevelt’s and the New Deal’s popularity.

Then Truman’s real story began. At the start of Roosevelt’s 1944 campaign, his fourth, Democratic kingpins booted Vice President Henry Wallace from the ticket. They judged the junior senator from Missouri the least bad choice. Truman insisted he didn’t want it. Roosevelt, on the phone, told his political people to get Truman on board.

Truman, the hardscrabble dirt farmer and small-town politician and Roosevelt, wealthy New York aristocrat, already president for twelve years, could not be more different. They had met briefly once or twice. After the election Truman barely saw Roosevelt. Then suddenly on April 12, 1945, 82 days after the inauguration, Roosevelt was gone. Truman was president.

It was the man from Independence who led the country through the gathering darkness of the Cold War. In late July he met with Stalin and Churchill at Potsdam in Germany to discuss the future of Europe, while the Soviet army held Eastern Europe. At Potsdam, which divided Germany into allied and Soviet zones, Truman grasped the reality of Soviet intentions.

On August 6, four days after Potsdam ended, an American bomber dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. After the second A-bomb on Nagasaki, the war was over.

When he took office in April Truman had heard only vaguely about the Manhattan Project. He made the decision to drop the bomb based on estimates of 4 million American and 5 million Japanese casualties in an invasion of Japan. He said, “it was done to save 125,000 youngsters on the U.S. side and 125,000 on the Japanese side from getting killed and that is what it did.”

In April 1948 Truman established the Marshall Plan to provide emergency assistance to Western Europe. In three years the U.S. sent more than $13 billion in aid. In June 1948 Soviet troops blocked road and rail access to Berlin. Truman ordered resupply by air, the Berlin Airlift. In nearly a year the allies conducted more than 278,000 flights carrying food and fuel to Berlin. The Soviets called off the blockade in May 1949.

The 1948 election looked hopeless for the Democrats. The experts predicted a Republican landslide for Thomas Dewey. It seemed only Truman believed in Truman. He made a cross-country train tour, speaking to millions, defending the New Deal: Social Security, universal health care, minimum wage. He blasted Dewey as the rich man’s candidate. Election day showed the polls were wrong, the people voted Truman a full term. 

In June 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea. While the McCarthy “Red Scare” raged at home, Truman sent American troops, 90 percent of the U.N. task force. When Communist Chinese forces attacked in October, U.N. troops were forced to retreat. Supreme Far East Commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur urged attacking China with atomic bombs and ignored Truman’s orders. On April 11, 1951, Truman fired MacArthur, setting off a firestorm of protest.

Truman survived an assassination attempt in November 1950. He survived shady dealings by staff people and the McCarthy slanders. But in 1952 he decided not to run again. He tried to persuade Dwight Eisenhower to run as a Democrat. Instead, Eisenhower ran as a Republican and won in a landslide. During his campaign he declined to disavow McCarthy. Truman saw him for what he was: a politician, and said so.

On Inauguration Day morning the Eisenhowers refused to enter the White House for a cup of coffee and greet the Trumans. Instead they waited in the car.

When Truman left office presidents did not receive pensions. He returned to Independence. Luckily he got a contract to write his memoirs. Years later, on July 30, 1965 President Johnson came to Independence to sign the new Medicare bill, Truman’s lifelong cause.

On a visit to the White House in January 1952, Winston Churchill said to Truman, “I must confess, sir, I held you in very low regard [at Potsdam]. … . I misjudged you badly. Since that time you, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.”

When Truman ordered American forces into action in Korea, New York Times columnist James Reston wrote, “These are days calling for steady nerves, for a strict eye on the ball and for a renewed resolve to keep our purposes pure … . The occasion has found the man in Harry Truman.”

McCullough cites the tributes: Dean Acheson, Secretary of State (’49-’53), called him the “captain with the mighty heart.” In 1948 George Marshall, who led both State and Defense, said it was “the integrity of the man” that would stand down the ages.

Eric Severeid, journalist and author who observed Truman for years, wrote ” … remembering him reminds people what a man in that office ought to be like. It’s character, just character. He stands like a rock in memory now.”

Integrity, character, in national leadership. What an idea.

On our return drive from Wyoming we stopped in Abilene, Kansas, on a pouring rainy day and visited the Eisenhower Library. Impressive. Eisenhower was a great general. Truman was a great president.