Harry Truman
June 12, 2007
Harry Truman was one of the near-great presidents. He isn’t among that handful who are universally acknowledged as great, either because they are carved on Mount Rushmore, or because they are named Franklin Roosevelt. But he’s certainly in the next echelon.
And yet that doesn’t really explain the enduring rhetorical appeal of “consider Harry Truman”, or the widespread assumption in foreign policy circles that Democrats should be more like Truman.
He was an amazingly unpopular president in his time. His approval ratings when he left office had fallen into the 20s, to depths only otherwise reached by miserable failures like Richard Nixon and George Bush. And the reason his approval ratings were so low is because his foreign policy was pretty bad.
That foreign policy looks like a mixed bag now, sixty years later, but the good things — NATO, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, anticommunism — were outweighed at the time by the futility of the Korean War, which had turned into a stalemate that should have been brought to an end. (Eisenhower understood that, and upon taking office, he immediately ended the war — if there’s going to be a stalemate, you may as well stop killing each other).
Truman won re-election — his famous comeback victory — in spite of his foreign policy, not because of it. He won by running to the left on domestic issues. His Fair Deal platform included universal health care, the repeal of Taft-Hartley (which the conservatives in Congress has passed over his veto), and the desegregation of the armed forces (proof that Faulkner was right: it precipitated Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat presidential run, of which Trent Lott is so proud). Truman also pushed for expansions to Social Security and other New Deal programs.
But the appeal to “consider Harry Truman” is never directed by liberals at moderates whose domestic policy is too timid. It’s almost always directed by Democrats at other Democrats whose foreign policy is insufficiently hawkish, perhaps because one can argue that the Korean War, like the make-believe version of the Iraq War which people at The New Republic wanted, and which Tom Friedman still thinks exists in the real world, was a justifiable war that was prosecuted poorly.
It’s odd that the one really black mark against Truman — the Korean War — is the one part of his record that pseudo-serious people point to as evidence of how Democrats should act. But wouldn’t his presidency have been far more successful if, for example, he had stopped at the 38th parallel in the fall of 1950, and his record of domestic liberalism and international cooperation remained unblemished by 100,000 American casualties, over half a million Allied casualties, and millions of dead civilians?
Wouldn’t it be better to learn from the mistakes of the Truman Administration, instead of relying on Truman’s successes and the passage of time to obscure his failures, and thus strengthen the extremely weak case for a foreign policy based on a hypothetically competent George Bush with a D behind his name?
June 12th, 2007 at 10:56 am
“One Black Mark”??
How about the first and only use of an atomic and a hydrogen bomb on civilians? Go to the library and check out Richard Rhodes two books: Dark Sun and The Making of the Atomic Bomb. He conclusively and exhaustively documents how truly unnecessary those attacks were.
Seems like a couple of more black marks to me…..
June 12th, 2007 at 11:07 am
ETG: That’s fair, and I certainly won’t try to defend the bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, nor the mid-century policy of “strategic” bombing in general.
June 13th, 2007 at 5:19 am
I was expecting a little centrist drivel, but I found myself in agreement with your post. As you point out and ETG validates it is the foreign policy end where he is most disastrous.
I have heard more than one past Democrat reflect positively on Truman as when the Democrats were pure. I think some of this is on the foreign policy end and revolved around American strength. Truman did not put a finger to the wind or rely on polls, he just did the right thing - lead.
One the social front many of the New Deal programs solidifies FDR rather than Truman’s legacy. 2 of the 3 accomplishments never came about in the end. If he did succeed in Taft and Healthcare I think his legacy would be very different today.
June 13th, 2007 at 9:45 am
Truman did not put a finger to the wind or rely on polls, he just did the right thing - lead.
I would modify that a bit, and argue that Truman’s popularity comes from the sense that he was completely independent from TR’s “malefactors of great wealth”, and that, when he made decisions, he was looking out for the average working American. Even when he made bad decisions, he was at least trying to make good ones, in that he was governing in the national interest, and not the particular interests of campaign contributors, or Halliburton, or something like that. That means he was honest (when one is bought and paid for, one has to pretend otherwise, and thus become a liar), and not an asshole.
(How many Democratic candidates have tried to cash in on that coin, which hasn’t been minted in forty years, just by claiming that they “fight for us”?)
June 13th, 2007 at 10:11 am
Drawing parallels between Iraq and Korea is very interesting. As you point out, if the UN-mandated forces had stopped at the 38th line then China wouldn’t have invaded, so and so forth. This is very similar to the approach that President Bush Sr. took when repelling the Iraq invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf War. Bush Sr. decided not to march into Baghdad and, as he described in his memoirs “hold the bloody bag of an occupied Iraq” like the current President Bush decided to do.
Truman and the United Nations intentions for North Korea were of the best intention, but the painful lesson that we need to learn is that democracy can’t be created by gunpoint. Promoting democracy in foreign lands requires a careful economic and political strategy and it takes patience.
June 13th, 2007 at 10:18 am
Another aspect of Truman I admire is that he stood up to McCarthyism and the politics of fear. It’s quite clear that many politicians and media outlets were weary of speaking out against the War in Iraq due to the likely fact that they were branded cowards and unpatriotic.
Here’s quote from a 1951 Time magazine article “McCarthyism” v. “Trumanism”:
“Americanism” is under attack, [Truman] declared, by people “who are loudly proclaiming that they are its chief defenders . . . They are trying to create fear and suspicion among us by the use of slander, unproved accusations and just plain lies . . . They are trying to get us to believe that our Government is riddled with Communism and corruption . . . These slandermongers are trying to get us so hysterical that no one will stand up to them for fear of being called a Communist. Now this is an old Communist trick in reverse . . . That is not fair play. That is not Americanism.”
June 13th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
That’s a fascinating Time article for a number of reasons, and not only for the idea that Truman kept his head about him when all about were losing theirs.
The contempt in which the editors (at least I assume it’s an editorial — there’s no byline or author) held McCarthy is obvious - his charges were “without proof then or thereafter”, he was “no gentleman”, and his “big mouth” shows a “callous disregard for the truth”.
And I’m nodding along, vaguely thinking about how much more clear-eyed political analysis was back then, when the news was professional and aspired to tell the truth. But then they conclude:
Say what?? They acknowledge that all of McCarthy’s charges are bogus, and that he’s a liar. But the real problem, apparently, is that Truman is “appeasing Communism”, at the same time that he’s committed the nation to an increasingly deadly war against Communists in East Asia. And all of the adjectives the editors hurled at McCarthy — “without proof”, “disregard for the truth” — could apply equally to their own conclusions.
And I can picture exactly the same sort of thing on our current cable news shows. The more things change.
June 13th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Ben,
That’s fair. What differers him from the centrists we find amongst ourselves is the steady hand, and trust worthiness. Even though I disagree with all of Bush’s policy there is some reliability, consistency, trustworthiness to his decision.
I think Truman offers many of those same qualities but in more of a positive light. I recently read a poll in which congress is getting high disapproval ratings. Much of this is disappointment about how the Democrats have handled their majority.
June 13th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
Broadly speaking, I think there are three different kinds of centrists:
(1) people who hold right-wing positions on some issues, and left-wing positions on others, and who thus don’t identify easily with either party: hard-core abortion opponents who also want a social safety net and environmental protection, or your stereotypical blue-collar Reagan Democrat.
(2) politicians who actively seek compromise and bipartisanship, out of some combination of non-ideological pragmatism, a general commitment to comity, or simply because deal-making is where the fun of being a Congressman is: Daniel Moynihan, or Evan Bayh, or many of the old Rockefeller Republicans
(3) members of a weak or beaten-down opposition party who have convinced themselves of the need to go along for political expediency — if I vote for some horrible piece of Republican legislation, I’ll have some political coverage to vote against some other bill that’s even more horrible.
It’s mostly over now, but during that awful period between 2001 and 2003, a great many national Democrats found themselves in category 3. Kerry and Edwards on the Iraq vote spring immediately to mind, but you saw the same kind of thing on tax cuts and judges.
I don’t have any objection to (1) and (2), and I think lots of (2)’s are critical for effective government — their presence creates a more vibrant politics where different coalitions can form for different reasons, and we’re not trying to force parliamentary legislation through a Senate, in particular, that doesn’t function that way.
June 13th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
And Nate, just to head off the inevitable criticism of the Dems over the veto showdown and their attempt to impose deadlines for troop withdrawal.
A Democratic leadership filled with (3)’s is fundamentally different from a leadership that simply doesn’t have the votes to pass an ideal piece of legislation (they also didn’t have the votes to not pass anything at all).
June 13th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
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