Truman after all this time
By: Joseph S. Nye Jr
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Joseph S. Nye Jr still rates the 1992 biography as one of the best and with a moral lesson.
Truman
By David McCullough (1992)
Harry Truman was, as David McCullough notes, a little man with glasses who never graduated college and spent 10 years working on his father’s Missouri farm: a very different past from his Harvard-educated predecessor’s. This penetrating biography portrays Truman as a 19th-century man fated to make some of the most crucial decisions of the 20th century.
Although he said he lost no sleep over dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he refused to use a third bomb because the idea of killing “all those kids” was too horrible. And in 1950 when Chinese involvement in the Korean War led to a stalemate, Truman refused Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s request to drop up to 50 atomic bombs on Chinese cities. A yes to MacArthur might have paved the way to accepting nuclear bombs as normal weapons and caused the world to look like a very different place. Mr. McCullough sums up Truman as a man who held to the old guidelines: Work hard, do your best, speak the truth, assume no airs, trust in God, have no fear. He had a bedrock faith in the democratic process and never a doubt about who he was.
Joseph S. Nye Jr. , University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus and former Dean of the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Princeton University,won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, and earned a PhD in political science from Harvard. He has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and Deputy Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology. His most recent books include The Power to Lead; The Future of Power; Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era; and Is the American Century Over. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Diplomacy. In a recent survey of international relations scholars, he was ranked as the most influential scholar on American foreign policy, and in 2011, Foreign Policy named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers.
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Truman is still relevant to this very day:
"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear"....Harry S Truman
Sounds like the tRump administration to a T.
It's the Democrats who strive to abolish all opposing views. That's why the American people don't want them in control of our lives.
Greg, you have to admit that Truman was a much different kind of democrat. In his case he was a Democrat!
If there were democrats like Truman i would consider voting for them. The current crop of dems, no chance in hell i’ll i’d even consider voting for them.
OMG! Now that you mention it, even I would be tempted!
Truman, while not a saint by any means, had a sense of responsibility and honesty that really doesn't exist in public life today.
I can't even begin to imagine how he'd view what's become of his Democratic Party.
I can't even imagine how he'd view what's become of the gop.
Have you ever read Truman ?
You summed it up in two sentences. Nicely done.
Truman took responsibility for his actions and the actions of his administration. "The Buck Stops Here" was more than a cute saying for him. Trump never takes responsibility for anything he or his administration does or says.
He coined the phrase, didn't he?
How about you? Have you got to read Truman?
The buck stops with tRump, goes right into his pocket, and Ivanka's and Don, Jr.'s, and Eric's . . .
Either discuss the topic, or leave or I start ticketing. This is about Truman and/or David McCullough's biography.
It was a pleasure
Neither have any of the last three presidents...Obama, Bush, or Clinton.
Did you notice the way Joseph Nye defined Truman's virtues? There are few in politics today who share those virtues.
What goes unmentioned is the condition of our society. It has collapsed.
Got your message!
Thank you my friend
Nice little link on Truman's work on the U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program .
Truman's work on the committee save the US not only money but lives during WWII - it also made him a viable candidate for Vice President.
That was true oversight. We really don't see many in congress looking to save the taxpayers money anymore. As far as being a viable Vice Presidential candidate, there has always been much controversy over how that all came about. The important thing is that when he was called upon to be President, he walked into the job as if he was programmed for the job. Maybe I'm overstating it.
This is among my favorite Truman stories:
"On 25 October 1945 President Harry S. Truman received Oppenheimer in the Oval Office; the physicist had requested the meeting in an effort to persuade the president to support international controls on nuclear weapons. Truman disarmed Oppenheimer by asking when the latter thought the Russians would develop a nuclear weapon; Oppenheimer replied that he did not know, to which Truman interjected: "Never!"
Sensing a lack of urgency in the U.S. leader, and perhaps a little overwhelmed by their first meeting, Oppenheimer confided, "Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands." The remark infuriated Truman who bluntly replied (as he later told David Lilienthal, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission), that "the blood is on my hands, let me worry about that," smoothly ejected the physicist and instructed Secretary of State Dean Acheson never to bring "that son of a bitch in this office ever again."