President Truman - 30 December 1972

I don’t know who first said, "they were giants in those days", but it is the cry of every generation which sees its own leaders going, or gone, and the new men coming up.

My father was a Manchester liberal till the day he died, which made him, at the end, seem as quaint as a Chartist, and he never got over the magic of his youthful hero, and by the early middle age was deploring the fact that Lloyd George was not Mr Gladstone, and then that Sir Archibald Sinclair was not Lloyd George. After that he gave up, simply retaining to the end, his dislike of all Labour leaders and his distrust of all Tories.

One thing about Harry Truman that is still rousing and funny after a quarter of a century, is that everybody, on the day he became president, turned into an old man, deploring the disappearance of the giants and the arrival in the White House of a mouse.

To almost half of the population Roosevelt was by no means a hero but he was a giant – goliath maybe, a gigantic fraud possibly – but to everybody a big man, who infuriated his enemies all the more by looking and acting like the president, all the more majestic when he was all the more informal. But on the day he died, it wasn’t only Franklin Roosevelt that people mourned for. Ardent Republicans, rid at last of the man they had loathed for 12 long years, thought of Teddy Roosevelt and then looked at Harry S Truman. And equally went into shock.

Now this was due simply to the fact, which none of us likes to admit at the time, that we know very little about vice presidents. We know a lot more about Spiro Agnew since Mr Nixon allowed him and his speech writers to needle the liberals. But Mr Agnew’s taste for invective and love of alliteration is really about all we know, except that anybody watching him tee off on a golf course as he stands – you might say at six o’clock – had better get well away from twelve o’clock high because we do know that the vice president has an uncanny knack of driving at right angles. He must be the only golfer in history who has struck the same woman twice, with two successive golf balls.

But we really don’t know much about Mr Agnew because his freedom to rage the liberals, a useful way of allowing Mr Nixon to signal to the Wallace conservatives that he still their man, is no more than a long leash on which Mr Agnew is permitted to cavort in the White House pasture. In spite of the promise, that every president has given since Eisenhower, to transform the role of the vice president and turn him into something like a deputy president, once the promise is given, the vice president retires into his traditional obscurity, being as Lincoln said, a man appointed to sit in the outer office of the White House hoping to hear the president cough.

Even the reporters among us back in the war days knew little about Senator Truman. He ran a war investigating committee that did a continuous clean-up job on war profiteering, both in and out of the government, but in war time, much of this probing was necessarily secret and so were most of the committee sessions. All that most of us knew at the convention which, on Roosevelt’s orders, gave Truman the vice presidential nomination, was that he had been hard-working senator, had brought a sharp eye and a new broom to war contracts, and was otherwise a small town man from Missouri – said to be honest but under the suspicious cloud of owing his political career to one of the most unsavoury city bosses in the United States.

And then the word came from Georgia on that unforgettable Friday afternoon in April 1945 and we all felt – as Truman said he felt – "as if the sun and the stars had fallen on me". At the first press conference he gave as president, we crowded in there, and I think that, to a man, the reporters felt much the same, though they had opposite ways of expressing it.

The ones who said, "My God what have we been landed with?" were rebuked with others who, equally fearful, said, "This is no time to tear him down, we have got to build him up". Everybody assumed that he was badly in need of a boost into the White House throne. It was taken for granted that he was a midget in a giant's shoes, and very soon the anecdotes and the rumours began to abound among the opposition press that he was the lackey (which he wasn’t) of that same unsavoury city boss, Tom Pendergast of Kansas City, and that though he had fought in France in the First World War, when he went back to Kansas City, he couldn’t even run a clothing shop without going bankrupt. The slur of failed haberdasher never left him.

What we didn’t know about this seemingly very average American, could have forewarned us about his toughness, grittiness and mulish preference for standing on his own feet, and making up his own mind. He was, if we’d only known it, a very durable product of the last days of the frontier. He was born in Independence, Missouri, which only 35 years before he was born had been the outfitting centre for the first gold rushes on their way to California. Independence was hard by the wide Missouri and it was where the west began, in the practical sense that there the rail road ended and the middle ages started. From the Missouri for 2,000 miles to the American river there was only one way to go, you had to walk. Harry Truman grew up knowing the remnants of families that had walked and died along the way. He knew crippled veterans of the Civil War, he had seen the John Deere plough break the iron sod of the plains, and he’d seen the money power of New York break the heart of the homesteaders.

He was a farmer's son, but he had seen farmers mortgaged to their machines. And as a small boy he had another career, in mind: he would become, a professional soldier. He was very bright and very studious and then he got diphtheria, the children’s plague in those day, and for quite a time he was paralysed. He studied to go to West Point but his bad eyes failed him. Then came the war, and he enlisted in a field artillery regiment, was promoted to captain, and was given command of a battery which fought in the Saint-Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne Offensives. His memories of the war told you a lot about him. He remembered later, with pride, that he had successfully run the regimental canteen, that he had controlled a very tough battery, that he learned respect for men of origins and religions very different from his own, made a heap of odd friends, and for seven months, when he wasn’t fighting, he was playing an endless poker game back in the woods.

Well, when he got home to Kansas City he wanted, above all, to marry his old girl Bess Wallis. He did. Then he got together with his old sergeant, a young Jew who had had some experience of running a store, and they opened one of their own in what used to be called Gents' Furnishings, on Twelfth Street. Not for nothing is Kansas City's Twelfth Street the original site of the Twelfth Street blues. The farmers' fat prices for wheat to a raft of European allies shrank to nothing – well at any rate from $6 to 90 cents when the war was over – and Harry Truman and Eddie Jacobson discovered that 90-cent wheat would not by $15 shirts, and they went bust.

By the way, as late as 1940 Truman’s mother had her farm foreclosed, and this 88-year-old was moved out with her furniture. When Truman was already in his 30s he put a little money in a zinc mine in Oklahoma and lost it. He drilled a dry hole for oil in Kansas. He saw a partner commit suicide. He went into politics, and he knocked on doors, and he learnt the name and the needs of everybody in his neighbourhood, and in the old, and now greatly despised way, he did people favours big and small. He never doubted that working with people of all sorts – not just with the people who share your views – was the essence of politics and when he was in his 70s, at the end of his presidency, he once said, with obvious pride, in any election, "I could deliver 11,000 votes, and not steal a one".

Now such a man might go through all this and come out of it with a tough hide and a ready gift of cynicism. We'd not offhand say that he was thereby qualified to be President of the United States. But the frontier has nursed more remarkable presidents than any other incubator. Harry Truman grew quite a character on the frontier. His judgment of people in general was fortified by the Old Testament, which tended to show him that Egyptians and Syrians were not very different from Kansans and Missourians. And he had all his life, a mania for history and geography.

Dean Acheson said that Truman, "had forgotten more history than Roosevelt and Churchill knew together". And before Truman sent General Marshall to China, he gave him a two-hour briefing on the farm problems of China over the past few hundred years. He certainly must seem the unlikeliest answer to the question: which president had the ambition to write in English as clear and informative as Cicero?

Well, from the first day of his presidency to the last, we need have had no fears about his mousiness. We staggered out of that first press conference after taking a drubbing from a rubbery sergeant major. He always knew what he wanted, "just give me the information," he once said to the droning Cabinet officer, "and leave the moralising to me".

In times of crisis he called on every advisor and expert in sight and sat blinking, and listening, and saying nothing. He did this on a famous Sunday afternoon when the chiefs of staff, and his secretary of state, were very eloquent, eloquent for hours, about the complicated hazards of going into Korea. And when they had done he said very gravely, "The League of Nations collapsed when everybody decided that it was too risky to help Abyssinia. And that's where we are today, and if we are going to have a United Nations, we have got to bring in a resolution, get it to the security council and go into South Korea tomorrow". And that's what happened.

Arnold Toynbee has, or had, the alarming belief that more than any man of our time, Harry Truman has guaranteed the approach of doomsday. He is already being called a slap-happy warmonger, the actual inventor rather than the arrester, of the Cold War.

Well, no reputation ever stays the same, but when they have chipped away at him I think there will be enough granite left in that plucky face to remind us that more than anybody except Dean Acheson, he put Europe on its feet after the second war. And when the Russian threat to western Europe was very real indeed, he stopped it. At the time, we all had cause to be exceedingly grateful to him.

Our lights may not be his, but you can only judge a man historically by his own lights, and by those lights he was very intelligent, and circumspect, colosally hardworking, totally dedicated to the idea of democracy, and bouncing with courage.

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