by Kevin Burton
Not sure what I expected in advance from the Harry S. Truman Museum in Independence, Missouri, but I ended up in tears.
Truman was the Vice President thrust into the presidency just 82 days into his term, following the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945. By then the tide had turned in favor of the allies in World War II, but the conflict was far from over.
Truman had met alone with FDR only twice since becoming Vice President. He wasn’t exactly up to speed. The country and the world called Truman unprepared, and worse.
Expectations were low when he took office. His popularity ratings were quite low when he left office in 1953.
But historians now rate Truman as one of the best presidents, calling him the right man in the right place, at the right time.
“Historically, I think you’d have to put Truman very high on the list of presidents,” said former CBS Evening News anchorman and broadcast legend Walter Cronkite, who covered Truman. “He had a sense of perception — of America’s place in the world, a sense of humanity and justice — and courage with all of that.”
“That’s a pretty good formula for an effective presidency. He studied, made decisions — and by God made it work in the context of the times they were in. He was progressive in the sense of moving us forward and doing it with courage,” Cronkite said.
The museum is a history of an “ordinary man on an extraordinary journey.”
“Harry Truman left office with the lowest approval rating of any president to that time. Yet in the decades that followed, scholars revisited his leadership in the context of the challenges he had to address,” reads a passage on the museum’s website. “
“Faced with some of the most difficult tests to confront any president, he did much to shape America and the world in the last half of the 20th century and beyond.
In this format I won’t do a thorough examination of his accomplishments. But it was Truman who desegregated the American military. On his watch also were, the Marshall Plan, under which Europe was rebuilt, the US recognizing Israel as a nation, the Berlin airlift after the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, the firing of General Douglas McArthur for insubordination and development of the hydrogen bomb.
Truman of course, made the decision to use the devasting atomic bomb, developed under the Roosevelt administration, to end the war. In Japan.
My wife Jeannette and I toured the Truman Museum on the first part of a recent vacation. We were headed from Kansas to Indianapolis to play beep baseball for the Cleveland Scrappers in a tournament there.
The first thing we saw at the museum was a video and print display of quotes about and by Truman. As giants of the 20th century honored him, I was struck by the basic decency of the man, his work ethic and sense of fair play.
Truman was the kind of everyday-man leader the American constitution was built to produce. I then thought of recent occupants of the White House, how lesser they have been.
In that moment I couldn’t see a road back to where we were, and it brought me to tears.
After we decided to go to the Truman museum, I looked into the old Chicago song “Harry Truman.” I didn’t understand the song, which came out in the post-Nixon mid-70s. Here’s a Wikipedia account of what it was all about:
“Harry Truman” is a song written by Robert Lamm for the group Chicago and recorded for their album Chicago VIII (1975), with lead vocals by Lamm. It reached number 13 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.”
“Written after the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon, the lyrics are a tribute to a former President that Lamm felt the American people could trust — straight-talking Harry S. Truman. “
Sample lyric:
“America needs you, Harry Truman, Harry could you please come home? Things are looking bad, I know you would be mad to see what kind of men prevail upon the land you love.”
I expected to buy matching t-shirts at the museum, showing Truman holding up the infamous Chicago Tribune headline “Dewey Defeats Truman” after the paper famously predicted the wrong outcome of the 1948 presidential election.
But “Dewey Defeats Truman” was nowhere to be seen. It was not on merchandise, not mentioned in any of the election accounts.
When I asked about this, a worker hypothesized that this material was downsized out of the museum. She also said the museum didn’t have the copyright.
Of course I wanted to march into Indianapolis wearing a “Dewey Defeats Truman” shirt to signify that my underdog Cleveland beep baseball team could win, despite expectations to the contrary, just as Truman did.
But I’d like to think Truman himself may have nixed such a thing from the museum, that the humility of the man just wouldn’t allow for it.
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