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The Trials of Harry S. Truman: The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945-1953
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About This Book
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year Jeffrey Frank, author of the bestselling Ike and Dick, returns with the first full account of the Truman presidency in nearly thirty years, recounting how so ordinary a man met the extraordinary challenge of leading America through the pivotal years of the mid-20th century. The nearly eight years of Harry Truman's presidency—among the most turbulent in American history—were marked by victory in the wars against Germany and Japan; the first use of an atomic weapon; the beginning of the Cold War; creation of the NATO alliance; the founding of the United Nations; the Marshall Plan to rebuild the wreckage of postwar Europe; the Red Scare; and the fateful decision to commit troops to fight in Korea. Historians have tended to portray Truman as stolid and decisive, with a homespun manner, but the man who emerges in The Trials of Harry S. Truman is complex and surprising. He believed that the point of public service was to improve the lives of one's fellow citizens, and was disturbed by the brutal treatment of African Americans. Yet while he supported stronger civil rights laws, he never quite relinquished the deep-rooted outlook of someone with Confederate ancestry reared in rural Missouri. He was often carried along by the rush of events and guided by men who succeeded in refining his fixed and facile view of the postwar world. And while he prided himself on his Midwestern rationality, he could act out of emotion, as when, in the aftermath of World War II, moved by the plight of refugees, he pushed to recognize the new state of Israel. The Truman who emerges in these pages is a man with generous impulses, loyal to friends and family, and blessed with keen political instincts, but insecure, quick to anger, and prone to hasty decisions. Archival discoveries, and research that led from Missouri to Washington, Berlin and Korea, have contributed to an indelible, and deeply human, portrait of an ordinary man suddenly forced to shoulder extraordinary responsibilities, who never lost a schoolboy's romantic love for his country, and its Constitution.
Reviews
"With a new kind of Cold War heating up and the foibles of our chief executives an ever more intense matter of scrutiny and concern, Mr."
"Biographers have a built-in bias toward giving their subject credit for anything within reach; Frank leans almost in the opposite direction ..."
"a book that, in its timing, acts almost as a blueprint for a liberal president to navigate a challenging world, focused through the prism of a man who was nobody's real first choice for president and yet forged an envious record ..."
"a very conventional book about Truman's presidency."
"Although he uses archival records himself, Frank dutifully cites abundant secondary works."
"Truman is very readable."
"Frank is drawn to the human side of this story: the backroom sniping, the jockeying for position, the personality clashes, and the diplomatic pageantry that produced the postwar world order."
"Marshall, Dean Acheson, and James Vincent Forrestal ..."
"Frank not only illuminates the global and domestic difficulties surrounding Truman, but also probes the complex character of the man himself—a give-'em-hell combativeness, which carried Truman to unexpected triumph over Dewey in 1948, set against a vulnerability evinced in his grief at the passing of his aged mother."
"Frank astutely analyzes the geopolitics Truman confronted while conveying his character in elegant, evocative prose ..."
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