“Some of the presidents were great, and some of them weren’t. I can say that because I wasn’t one of the great presidents, but I had a good time trying to be one, I can tell you that.”
— Harry S. Truman, 33rd president
of the United States.
That may have been Truman’s assessment of his own presidency, but history in some ways has proved him wrong. He had all the hallmarks of being a caretaker president: He was short-tempered, had little rhetorical flourish and had been inserted into the presidency after his predecessor, one of the most popular presidents of his time, died unexpectedly. No wonder it seemed Truman was destined to keep the Oval Office occupied only until more suitable material came along. He was suitable enough on his own. With the way history’s been unfolding lately, we could use “Give-’em-hell Harry” right about now.

We are in a period of time that
Truman would have felt at home in. Enron is threatening to bring instability to the government at the same time we are prosecuting a war we
hadn’t wanted. Truman was in the same boat — twice. As a senator from Missouri, he had been disgusted with the extravagant waste and fraud that contractors and labor unions were committing during the massive buildup of military forces after the attack on Pearl Harbor. These included building Army camps with extremely cheap materials for exorbitant prices and “featherbedding” union workers by having them on the job so that extra labor costs would go into union coffers.
These excesses were smokescreened by the usual gang of lobbyists, company Ken Lay would feel comfortable in. Truman never bowed to the lobbyists. In the Senate, he headed a committee that succeeded in ending many of these practices.
With the Enron mess the way it is, we could use a Harry Truman to look into the shady business of the Senate. Sadly, we don’t have any Trumans left. While we have people who have stepped up to the plate, their effort no doubt is a Band-Aid meant to reassure voters, not the hard political road to hoe.
After Truman’s ascendancy into the presidency in April 1945, Nazism had receded as the bogeyman of Europe. Instead, our erstwhile allies, the Soviet Union, were the major threat that loomed in the minds of Americans. Truman didn’t want war with the Soviets. Again, it was thrust upon him when North Korea attacked United Nations forces across the 38th Parallel in 1950. The United States was at war.
Truman, once again, had a tough political decision. The immensely popular General Douglas MacArthur was agitating for an expansion of the war into China, which would have brought them and the Soviet Union into what by then could have become a nuclear war, and worse, for sending diplomatic threats to the Chinese, which was the purview solely of the state department and the president. Truman did the only thing open to him: He recalled MacArthur from his position as the commander in Korea in 1951. Sen. Joe McCarthy, the Red-baiter from Wisconsin, as well as a large part of the American public excoriated Truman as being a Communist sympathizer, and this scorn may have been the major cause of his decision not to run in 1952. Still, Truman braved public anger and did the right thing.
As he himself said, he may not have been one of the great presidents. He was something better: one of the honest presidents.