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Truman (Paperback)
by David McCullough
| Category:
Biography, American history, American presidency |
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Hailed by critics as a true masterpiece, David McCullough's sweeping biography of Truman provides a deeply moving look at an extraordinary, singular American and has captured the heart of the nation. |
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Author: David McCullough
Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition
Pub. in: June, 1993
ISBN: 0671869205
Pages: 1,120
Measurements: 9.4 x 6.1 x 2 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00224
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0671869205
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- Awards & Credential -
From twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Augubly the best works of David McCullough. |
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- MSL Picks -
Hailed by critics as an American masterpiece, David McCullough's sweeping biography of Harry S. Truman has captured the heart of the nation. The life and times of the thirty-third President of the United States, Truman provides a deeply moving look at an extraordinary, singular American. From Truman's small-town, turn-of-the-century boyhood and his transforming experience in the face of war in 1918, to his political beginnings in the powerful Pendergast machine and his rapid rise to prominence in the U.S. Senate, McCullough shows, in colorful detail, a man of uncommon vitality and strength of character. Here too is a telling account of Truman's momentous decision to use the atomic bomb and the weighty responsibilities that he was forced to confront on the dawning of a new age. Distinguished historian and prize-winning author David McCullough tells one of the greatest of American stories in this stirring audio adaptation of his Truman - a compelling, classic portrait of a life that shaped history.
****
McCullough is an extraordinary writer whose key strength in writing history is detailing the life of the subject in question, in this case, Harry S. Truman. This is a very substantial book that covers people and events from Truman's grandparents who moved to Missouri from Kentucky in the early to mid 19th Century up through Harry Truman's death in 1972. He ascended to the presidency in 1945 amidst some of the most difficult and challenging days in American history. He would also make some of the most difficult and long lasting decisions of any political leader not only in U.S. history, but in the world.
This narrative begins with the establishment of the Truman family in Missouri and Harry's birth in 1884. His childhood, family life, his role on the farm, courtship of Bess Wallace, life in Independence, Missouri and so many other aspects of his early life are very well described. Truman served his country in World War I, serving as a captain in Battery D. He gained immense loyalty from the men who served with him. He returned to Missouri, married Bess, went into business and later was called back to work on his family farm at Grandview.
Truman's politics derived from the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian traditions. Truman has been marked by some as a pawn of the political machine in Kansas City run by Tom Pendergast. Truman, however loyal he was to those who helped him advance in political positions, nevertheless maintained his basic character and honesty in dealing with public issues. His first public office was as county judge, which was more of an administrative position, like a county commissioner. Some of his proudest accomplishments included bringing better roads and a new courthouse.
Often overlooked as an amateur and political puppet of the Pendergast machine, Truman won a seat as one of Missouri's two U.S. Senators. He proved himself to be a hardworking and diligent public servant, most notably gaining nationwide recognition for his role as chairman of the committee than investigated Defense contracts and the widespread waste and inefficiency involved. Truman was also a reliable supporter of FDR's New Deal legislation, though he never became a close acquaintance of the president's, even when he did become the Vice Presidential candidate for the presidential ticket of 1944. This whole episode of choosing the VP nominee could have been a book in and of itself.
Roosevelt's health was clearly in question and declining through 1944. The position of VP could and would have huge implications for the next four years, most of which would turn into the Truman administration. This modest, unpretentious man from Missouri with very little experience in world affairs assumed the office of president less than three months into the fourth Roosevelt term. The amazing thing to me was how quickly he adjusted to his new role and acted so decisively. Truman would prove so many of his critics wrong from here on out.
Truman made some of the most difficult decisions of any president. The decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the announcement of what became the Truman Doctrine to fight and contain communism, the Marshall Plan to rebuild and stabilize Europe, U.S. recognition of the new state of Israel, the Berlin airlift, the National Security Act, NATO, the decision to fight in Korea, the firing of MacArthur and more. These are what McCullough focuses on, though not with in-depth analysis you could find in other sources. McCullough sees these larger decisions, mainly concerning foreign affairs, as the defining moments of the Truman Presidency. Unfortunately we only get glimpses of his Fair Deal programs which dealt with many of the major domestic issues like education, better housing, equal rights for blacks and so forth, though not all of these were accomplished during his presidency.
Perhaps Truman's greatest personal triumph was his election in his own right as president in 1948. This is covered very well by McCullough. There was something about the man that just never gave in to what others were saying about his chances of winning. This is perhaps what really defined Truman. He was so full of life; he had that vitality and inner strength that makes anyone admire him regardless of whether you always agreed with him or not. McCullough clearly admires Truman and let's face it, it's hard not to, and I admit my bias in Truman's favor as well. McCullough's strength is his ability to bring out the human qualities of the man he focuses on. It is a great talent, some think it irrelevant and unscholarly, but I think it is important.
Another great attribute to this book is the inclusion of the many people who were part of Truman's family and inner circle during the White House years. He was loyal to his family and friends, became disappointed with Eisenhower and utterly disliked Nixon, Joe McCarthy and Gen. MacArthur. There are really too many people discussed in this book for me to list. I especially enjoyed reading of his relationship with Gen. George Marshall and Dean Acheson. Truman wasn't perfect, he made mistakes as President, perhaps was too loyal to some people around him and some of his decisions were and remain controversial. But it's a testament to the man that he endured and kept working for the betterment of the American people and world peace. He was a president of and for the common man.
There's a lot I'm leaving out, but this is one of the best biographies I've ever read. Some historians classify this type of historiography as merely adhering to the traditional historical interest in great men of the past. Like Truman, I believe individual people can and do make a difference. At the same time, I realize that biographies have weaknesses and can't be the only source of studying past people and events for the serious student of history. I think popular and academic (professional) history can and should be able to coexist and work together to present history to students, scholars, and the wider public. Anyway, McCullough's biography on Truman is a must read.
(From quoting Publisher and David Montgomery, USA)
Target readers:
Anyone interested in American history, Korea War, American presidency, or Truman. Biography lovers, fictional history fans or anyone who loves David McCullough's works.
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David Mccullough, writer, historian, lecturer, and teacher, has received twice the Pulitzer Prize (for Truman and 1776), the Francis Parkman Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and two National Book Awards, for history and for biography. His previous books are The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, The Path Between the Seas,Mornings on Horseback, and Brave Companions.
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From Publisher
The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters - Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson - and dramatic events. In this riveting biography, acclaimed historian David McCullough not only captures the man - a more complex, informed, and determined man than ever before imagined - but also the turbulent times in which he rose, boldly, to meet unprecedented challenges. The last president to serve as a living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Truman's story spans the raw world of the Missouri frontier, World War I, the powerful Pendergast machine of Kansas City, the legendary Whistle-Stop Campaign of 1948, and the decisions to drop the atomic bomb, confront Stalin at Potsdam, send troops to Korea, and fire General MacArthur. Drawing on newly discovered archival material and extensive interviews with Truman's own family, friends, and Washington colleagues, McCullough tells the deeply moving story of the seemingly ordinary "man from Missouri" who was perhaps the most courageous president in our history.
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Blue River Country
As an agricultural region, Missouri is not surpassed by any state in the Union. It is indeed the farmer's kingdom...
The History of Jackson County, Missouri, 1881
I
In the spring of 1841, when John Tyler was President, a Kentucky farmer named Solomon Young and his red-haired wife, Harriet Louisa Young, packed their belongings and with two small children started for the Far West. They had decided to stake their future on new land in the unseen, unfamiliar reaches of westernmost Missouri, which was then the "extreme frontier" of the United States.
They were part of a large migration out of Kentucky that had begun nearly twenty years before, inspired by accounts of a "New Eden" in farthest Missouri - by reports sent back by Daniel Morgan Boone, the son of Daniel Boone and by the fact that in 1821 Missouri had come into the Union as a slave state. The earliest settlers included families named Boggs, Dailey, and Adair, McCoy, McClelland, Chiles, Pitcher, and Gregg, and by 1827 they had founded a courthouse town called Independence, pleasantly situated on high ground in Jackson County, in what was often spoken of as the Blue River country. Those who came afterward, at the time of Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young, were named Hickman, Holmes, and Ford, Davenport, McPherson, Mann, Noland, and Nolan, Freeman, Truman, Peacock, Shank, Wallace, and Whitset, and they numbered in the hundreds.
Nearly all were farmers, plain-mannered and plain-spoken, people with little formal education. Many of them were unlettered, even illiterate. They were not, however, poor or downtrodden, as sometimes pictured - only by the material standards of later times could they be considered wanting - and though none were wealthy, some, like red-haired Harriet Louisa, came from families of substantial means. She had said goodbye to a spacious Greek Revival house with wallpaper and milled woodwork, the Kentucky home of her elder brother and guardian, William Gregg, who owned numerous slaves and landholdings running to many hundreds of acres.
The great majority of these people were of Scotch-Irish descent. They were Baptists and they were Democrats, and like Thomas Jefferson they believed that those who labored in the earth were the chosen people of God. They saw themselves as the true Americans. Their idol was Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory of Tennessee, "One-man-with-courage-makes-amajority" Jackson, the first President from west of the Alleghenies, who was of their own Scotch-Irish stock. It was for him that Jackson County had been named, and like him they could be tough, courageous, blunt, touchy, narrow-minded, intolerant, and quarrelsome. And obstinate. "Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest I am hard to turn," was a line from an old Scotch-Irish prayer.
With their Bibles, farm tools, and rifles, their potent corn whiskey, their black slaves, they brought from Kentucky a hidebound loathing for taxes, Roman Catholics, and eastern ways. Their trust was in the Lord and common sense. That they and their forebears had survived at all in backwoods Kentucky - or earlier in upland Virginia and the Carolinas - was due primarily to "good, hard sense," as they said, and no end of hard work.
They were workers and they were loners, fiercely independent, fiercely loyal to their kind. And they were proudly prolific. David Dailey, recorded as the first man to break the prairie sod in Jackson County, came west with a wife and twelve sons, while Christopher Mann, who outlived everybody of that generation, had already produced with his Betsie seventeen sons and daughters and with a second marriage fathered eight more. (Years afterward, at age eighty-seven, this memorable Jackson County pioneer could claim he had never lost a tooth from decay and could still hold his breath for a minute and a half.) They believed in big families, they came from big families. Children were wealth for a farmer, as for a nation. President Tyler himself had eight children, and in another few years, at age fifty-four, following the death of his first wife, he would remarry and have seven more children, making a total of fifteen, a presidential record.
Solomon Young, who was one of eleven children, and his wife Harriet Louisa, one of thirteen, were from Shelby County, Kentucky, east of Louisville. And so was Nancy Tyler Holmes, a widow with ten children, who made the journey west to Missouri three or four years later, about 1845, once her sons had established themselves in Jackson County. Carrying a sack of tea cakes and her late husband's beaver hat in a large leather hatbox, she traveled in the company of several slaves and her two youngest daughters, one of whom, Mary Jane Holmes, was secretly pining for a young man back in Shelby County named Anderson Truman. He was one of twelve children.
If Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young were acquainted with any of the Holmes or Truman families by this time, there is no record of it.
Nearly everyone made the expedition the same way, traveling the wilderness not by wagon or horseback but by steamboat. The route was down the winding Ohio River from Louisville, past Henderson and Paducah, to the confluence of the Mississippi at Cairo, then up the Mississippi to St. Louis. Changing boats at St. Louis, they headed west on the Missouri, the "Big Muddy," fighting the current for 457 miles, as far as the river's sudden, dramatic bend. There they went ashore at either of two miserable, mudbound little river settlements, Wayne City or Westport, which put them within a few miles of Independence, still the only town of consequence on the frontier.
With the "terrible current" against them, the trip on the Missouri took a week. The shallow-draft boats were loaded so deep the water broke over the gunwales. Wagons and freight jammed the deck, cordwood for the engines, mules, horses, piles of saddles and harness, leaving passengers little room. (One side-wheel steamer of the era that sank in the river and was only recovered more than a century later, carried cargo that included everything from ax handles and rifles to school slates, doorknobs, whale oil lanterns, beeswax candles, 2,500 boots and shoes, and thousands of bright-colored beads and buttons intended for the Indian trade.) Day after day, the heavy, shadowed forest passed slowly by, broken only now and then by an open meadow or tiny settlement where a few lone figures stood waving from among the tree stumps. Some trees towering over the river banks measured six feet through. On summer mornings the early filtered light on the water could be magical.
These were the years of the great Missouri River paintings by George Caleb Bingham. The river Bingham portrayed was the settlers' path. The distant steamer appearing through the sun-filled morning haze in his Boatmen on the Missouri, as an example, could be the Radnor, the Henry Bry or Winona, any of twenty-odd river packets that carried the Kentucky people.
The only notable sign of civilization west of St. Louis was the state capitol on a bluff at Jefferson City, a white limestone affair, "very substantial in execution," within which was displayed a full-length portrait of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Missouri's own thundering voice of westward expansion. The painting was said to have cost the unheard-of sum of $1,000.
Besides those from Kentucky, the migration included families from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee, who, with the Kentuckians, made it a predominantly southern movement and so one of numerous slaveholders other than Nancy Tyler Holmes. Possibly, Solomon Young, too, brought slaves. In later years, it is known, he owned three or four - a cook, a nursemaid, one or two farmhands - which was about the usual number for those bound for Jackson County. They were farmers, not cotton planters, and for many, a slave was a mark of prosperity and social station. Still, the accumulative number of black men, women, and children traveling to the frontier was substantial. Incredibly, one Jabez Smith, a Virginia slave trader who set up business near Independence, is on record as having transported more than two hundred slaves.
White, black, young and old, they crowded the upbound steamers in the company of hellfire preachers and cardsharps, or an occasional pallid easterner traveling west for his health. Old journals speak, too, of uniformed soldiers on their way to Fort Leavenworth, blanketed Kaw (or Kansas) Indians, French fur traders and mountainmen with their long hair and conspicuous buckskins - a seemingly endless, infinitely colorful variety of humankind and costume. Nancy Tyler Holmes is said to have worn a white lace cap that concealed an ugly scar. As a child in Kentucky, during a Shawnee uprising, she allegedly saved herself by pretending to be dead, never moving or making a sound as she was being scalped. True or not, the story served long among her descendants as a measure of family grit... |
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Walter Isaacson (Time) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
McCullough's marvelous feel for history is based on an appreciation of colorful tales and an insight into personalities. In this compelling saga of America's greatest common-man president, McCullough adds luster to an old-fashioned historical approach... the sweeping narrative, filled with telling details and an appreciation of the role individuals play in, shaping the world.
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The Economist (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
Remarkable... you may open it at any point and instantly become fascinated, so easy, lucid, and energetic is the narrative and so absorbing the sequence of events.
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Alan Brinkley (The New York Times) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
A warm, affectionate and thoroughly captivating biography... the most thorough account of Truman's life yet to appear.
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Robert Dallek (Los Angeles Times Book Review) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
McCullough is a master storyteller whose considerable narrative skills have been put to exquisite use in re-creating the life and times of America's 33rd president. |
View all 14 comments |
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