'Decent' Harry Truman, thrust into the presidency, kept US afloat in wartime

Jeffrey Frank’s new book “The Trials of Harry Truman” takes a different tack than David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning doorstop “Truman” that became a bestseller 30 years ago. Frank doesn’t spend any time on Truman’s service in World War I or his stint as an enterprising haberdasher in Kansas City. This book isn’t concerned with the making of a man – it’s concerned with the making of a president.

Truman had very little training for that job. He’d been Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president for less than three months when Roosevelt died in April of 1945. Suddenly, Truman was thrust into the Oval Office and found himself in charge of a vast, hyper-industrialized country fighting the greatest war in human history.

To his credit, Frank seeks to look at the whole of Truman’s time in office. He spends some time, for instance, on Truman’s involvement with the race-related issues of his America. But even Frank, always ready to defend Truman, is forced to admit this involvement was limited. “Truman was never in a hurry when it came to the changes that real racial equality would bring,” he writes, adding optimistically: “but injustice, and unfairness, grated on him, the cruelties inflicted on blacks angered him, and he wanted no part of any of that.”

It’s hardly a picture of visionary leadership, but Frank is often commendably even-handed in that assessment. He refers to Truman as “a determined man, a man of limited imagination and experience, who happened to be a good man, and who managed to hold tight for nearly eight years as he was hurled through the mid-twentieth century, and wouldn’t, or couldn’t, let go.” It echoes the assessment of former Christian Science Monitor columnist Roscoe Drummond, who allowed, “While he does not count himself a heavy thinker, Mr. Truman knows what is going on in Washington.”

https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2022/0329/Decent-Harry-Truman-thrust-into-the-presidency-kept-US-afloat-in-wartime