If you are of my general age, you are going to love “Harry
Truman’s Excellent Adventure” by Matthew Algeo.
If you are a lot younger than I, you need to read it to better
understand why folks like me tend to get a little grumpy about how life in the
USA has changed during our lifetimes.
The book focuses on a 1953 road trip the former president
and his wife took from their Independence, Missouri, home through Washington to
New York and back. Algeo retraced their
journey, following the same routes and staying in, eating at, and visiting as
many of the same places as possible, describing what he saw and whom he met and
commenting on political, historical, cultural, social, and economic issues of
Truman’s time.
President Truman was the last president to freely walk the
streets of the nation’s capital both during and after his years as president,
the last to leave office without any federal government pension or help with
office expenses, and the last to leave without any Secret Service
protection. Truman, on principle, also
refused to profit from having served as President, never serving on boards or
being paid for speeches or endorsements.
He did lobby for federal financial support for ex-presidents and finally
got Eisenhower’s support for such, just before Eisenhower became an
ex-president.
President Truman’s service was not without controversy. He was the man who said “yes” to bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he took the US to an undeclared war in Korea. He was a Democrat, but a fiscal conservative
and a strong advocate of US military strength, even opposing defense cuts his
successor, Eisenhower, advocated. Truman
left office with a 22% approval rating, about the same as that of George W.
Bush.
Issues and events explored in Algeo’s book include the
American love affair with the automobile and development of the national
highway system, the Cold War, the death of main street, race, segregation and the KKK, birth
of television as a political tool, founding of the United Nations, the Iranian
revolution, McCarthyism, and, for Sci-Fi fans, the “Roswell Incident.” Truman’s relationships with and opinions of
presidents from Hoover to Nixon are included.
Nostalgia stirred up by this book in children of the 1940’s
will probably be matched by wonderment in the minds of their
grandchildren. There are two big drivers that account for the
changes: demographics and technology.
The population has more than doubled since Truman served, and the
melting pot concept has died in favor of some muddled concept of multiculturalism. And, in Truman’s day, everybody read the same
news stories and watched the same news on TV.
Now, few are reading news stories at all, and we are watching “reality
shows” on TV.
There is another difference.
Harry Truman was a humble public servant who came into office poor, left
just as poor, and died in pretty much the same condition, having netted less
than $50,000 from the publication of his memoirs. That has not happened since and will not
happen again.
Although I'm not a great reader of biographies, I was fortunate, about ten years ago, to read David Mc Cullough's biography of Harry Truman. It was a joy to read such a well written book but I found it remarkable that during Truman's presidency, in less than eight years he was faced with and participated in: the end of World War II and the defeat of Nazi Germany, the first use of a nuclear bomb and the defeat of Japan, the founding of the United Nations, the end of the Korean war, desegragation of the military, the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, the Truman Doctrine to contain communism. His pre-presidential years and his years after serving were remarkable as well. He was a terrific friend, soldier, husband and leader, and deserves a very high ranking when considering our former presidents.
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