Mark Malcomson
Truman: The Rise of the Unexpected President

Mark Malcomson - Truman: The Rise of the Unexpected President

- Hello everybody and welcome from a slightly cold, but nowhere near as bad as quite a lot of you’ve got it, London. I think, let me put a bit of context, let me tell you where I’m coming from on this. In the last 250 odd years in America there have been nine occasions where a President has not become President initially through the usual situation in the ballot, but has come through, in eight cases through the death of the incumbent President, and in one case through the resignation of Richard Nixon, and it has thrust a Vice President into the frontline right in the middle of a national crisis with the President having died. The Vice Presidency is a fascinating kind of role, it’s possibly arguably from 99.9% of the time the ultimate non-role. John Nance Garner, who we’ll talk about a little later, who was FDR’s first Vice President, famously described it as useless as a bucket of warm spit, he actually said something a lot more saucey than that, but that’s the sanitised version, and John Adams at the beginning basically said, “There’s no office that’s been contrived by mankind to be as useless”, in words to that effect, so the Vice President is in waiting, but at the same time is, but has to be ready to step in at the famous “At a heartbeat”, and that presents challenges and problems. Initially, back when the Constitution was written, they came up with this neat idea that in a world which wasn’t going to be partisan, the President was the person who came first in the electoral college and the Vice President was the person who was runner-up, and if you think about the results to that is we would at the moment have President Biden and Vice President Trump as the option.

Within 10 years they realised that was a pretty disastrous idea and, of course, passed the amendment that then changed it and you have this convention of a ticket and a ticket running President, Vice President, so you at least knew what you were getting if something happened to the President and that’s worked pretty well right the way up through history, and as the transfer of power has worked well on each occasion that a President has either died or left office. Each time it’s different, you have certain occasions like with Lincoln or with Kennedy or McKinley of where you have an assassination, which is obviously hugely traumatic at the time and the Vice President then has to step in as the new President as something of an interloper, has to bring the country together in a time of crisis and replace somebody who has been tragically taken away from the scene, and in other cases, like the case of Harry Truman, you have one where the President dies of natural causes.

Now Harry Truman had it harder than most, I would argue, is because he was replacing arguably one of the great Presidents of all time, certainly a President who’s the only person in history who’s won three elections in a row, four, sorry, four elections in a row, and was embarking, had completed three full terms, and was embarking on his fourth term and unusually for a President, he’d gone for that fourth, a third and fourth term, but he’d also dealt with two situations that were unprecedented, he had guided the country through the 1930’s in the greatest peacetime crisis that America ever faced, the Great Depression, and then he had guided America mostly through the Second World War, with the exception of the Civil War, arguably the most difficult international problems that the US had ever faced, and so Roosevelt was in a category of his own, in my view, in terms of what he’d done and what he’d had to support in terms of America, both peacetime and wartime, and this little man from Missouri, and I’m not being height-ist, he was little, he’s one of the shortest Presidents in history, it’s often intriguing to think would he have actually got elected had he been elected as President first time because America likes their Presidents tall mostly, but he becomes a President that people know very little about and they know very, what they do know isn’t particularly great, and I think why I talk about the rise of the unexpected President, I think he’s somebody that if you look at what happens prior to April the 12th, 1945, there is very little that you would anticipate that would all go well for a great Presidency.

What’s interesting is he becomes President 82 days after becoming Vice President, he is thrust into some of the biggest decisions a President has ever had to take, and leaves office just short of eight years later, goes back to Missouri with an approval rating in the low 20’s, not particularly popular, not particularly successful, has decided to not run again, but there’s an argument that had he done it would’ve been highly unlikely that he would’ve won, and yet we now look and when they do the surveys of historians every few years since the 1940’s, right the way through, Truman’s gone up and up and up. He’s always now ranked as one of the top 10 Presidents in history and often is skirting the top five, so what is fascinating to me is that pivotal date of the 12th of April, 1945 is one very much a before and after and how would you have assumed that somebody like Harry Truman would be considered to be in one of the greats of all time, and that’s one I think that is particularly challenging when you look at, so in the last century three Presidents have taken over in circumstances, twice due to death and once through to resignation, and if you look at the other two, Gerald Ford, he had been Minority Leader of the House, he was well known in the country, he’d been part of the Warren Commission, he was generally liked, well respected and had got to know America as being replacing Spiro Agnew as a honourable, safe pair of hands and had quite a lot of spotlight on him in that confirmation process. Lyndon Johnson was arguably the most equipped Vice President in history when he took over as President, yet if you look at Harry Truman, none of that’s the case.

You know, he’d been a good solid workerman Senator, he’d been a local politician in Missouri, and to be honest, there was nothing in that resume that we’ll talk about in a minute that would make you go, “Wow, yeah, he’s destined for great things.” Now having said that, I always have my theory that, you know, you look at the history of the American Presidency, and certainly in the last century, is that there are very few inevitable Presidents. There are Presidents that mostly are, in retrospect, looked to being very good, but there are so many ifs and buts and what’s that might have happened that you’re never quite sure whether they’re going to actually become a great President or even become President. Even the ones that we look back on now, like FDR’s and Reagan’s, there’s a lot of times that the fork of the road could have gone a different way, and that’s even more so for Vice Presidents. If you think about the three I’ve just talked about is that Truman is the third Vice President under FDR and as we’ll talk about, was a last minute choice. Obviously Nixon’s choice primarily was Spiro Agnew and Gerald Ford was a complete compromise when Spiro Agnew had to resign because of his tax affairs, and then of course, Lyndon Johnson, whilst had been chosen very cleverly in my view by John Kennedy to be his running mate, to really balance the ticket and give support in the South where Kennedy was weak, and if you look at the way the Electoral College panned out in 1960, it was a good choice, but by 1963 and into 1964, there’s a very good chance that Lyndon Johnson might’ve been dropped from the ticket.

He was doing badly, part of the reason Kennedy was down in Dallas was he was trying to shore up support in Texas, which in his view should have been Johnson’s job, and if Lyndon Johnson couldn’t even bring peace and sort his own state out, what use of he was to the ticket? He could have been off the ticket and would’ve been a footnote in history, “Who was John Kennedy’s first Vice President?”, yet in a moment he becomes President and then goes on to win the greatest popular vote in history a year later and, you know, five years later is basically ushered out of office in disgrace, not disgrace in the same way as Nixon, but in terms of that his popularity was a disaster. So, you have all of that going on, and I just wanted to give you context about why I think this is important to think about Vice Presidents. Vice Presidents, you know, have very few ceremonial jobs, very few jobs, ceremonial is most of them, they’re famously on the rubber chicken circuit, they go around to do local dinners, they go and support local candidates, they campaign when the President can’t campaign, they probably get the campaigning jobs that the President doesn’t want to do, and as a result they have very little to do, whereas in a heartbeat, they can have a lot to do, so they need to be prepared, or should be prepared, yet they’re often not and often thrown in at the deep end.

So, in terms of context around Harry Truman, I think that’s really important to have a think about that and think about the concept of the Vice Presidency, even on normal terms. Kamala Harris has an interesting job because the Senate is so tight, one of the things that the Vice President gets to do is cast the casting vote if there’s a tie in the Senate and of course in the first two years of Joe Biden’s administration, she got to do that quite regularly because it was a 50/50 Senate. Well, actually, Harry Truman inherited a Senate which was massively Democrat, so even that role was superfluous for him. So here we go, let’s think about the boy from Missouri and let’s think about how he, what could we say that gave us clues about him that why he would become the President he does, and maybe what gives us clues because that’s all a bit of a surprise. I’m going to share just a few slides, but hopefully they will come up on your screen now. Right, so assuming that’s all okay, “Harry Truman: The Unexpected President”. He’s a Missouri boy, now it’s interesting, Missouri, I hope there are some people from Missouri on the programme tonight, Missouri’s heartland America, its great claim to fame in the 20th century was that it predicted the President in every election with the exception of 1956, so whether it be, it was the ultimate swing state, there was no state that was better at predicting elections and bizarrely, the election you’re going to get wrong, it was 1956, and I think that’s a little bit of a residual tribute to Harry Truman making sure that it flipped from Eisenhower the four years before to Adlai Stevenson, but otherwise it was very much a state that was a bellwether for the way that the United States votes.

To my knowledge he’s the only President to come from Missouri and his background was very, very much of a Missouri person and a Missouri politician. In fact, with the exception of, well, when he served in the First World War, and also when he was in Washington, he lived and died in Missouri. He grew up in Missouri, became of age in Missouri, he worked in Missouri, he eventually goes to Washington and then when he finishes in Washington, he gets his car and he and Bess drive back to Missouri and that’s who he is, and he’s incredibly proud of his roots in Missouri, which I think is really important for people to know in the way that things operate, in terms of how his psyche is, and I think that’s something that does tell you something about the quality of his character, very loyal to his home state, and also not particularly adventurous, he’s not somebody who travels around. A lot of Presidents have a home state, but they’ve also moved around, one of the great things about the United States is people move around a lot, but he didn’t and he stays in Missouri. He’s born in Lamar, Missouri in 1884, he stays there with his father and mother for six years before he moves to Independence, where his library is, and then his parents move there so that he can get a better education. One of the little things, by the way, which I think is a lovely endearing and slightly quirky kind of thing about him, is that Americans, and certainly American politicians, like middle names. JFK, FDR, LBJ, there’s a whole thing about middle names and most of you will know, I’m sure, it’s Harry S. Truman.

What I think is fascinating is the S doesn’t stand for anything. The S actually is a nod allegedly to his two grandfathers who both had S’s in their names and his parents just decided he would be Harry S. Truman, which I do think is a little odd, but that’s neither here nor there. He, his parents do, they’re poor, they’re farming stock, he’s born on a farm and his parents just struggle and he struggles mostly, and this is the bit around character that I think is important, this struggle that he goes through around finances. When he leaves the White House, he doesn’t own a home. When he leaves the White House, he doesn’t know how he’s going, at that point the Presidents did not have pensions, and he didn’t know how he was going to afford to live as a former President. Lots of other Presidents have either made a lot of money, started or inherit, you know, came from great wealth, his didn’t and that was a real kind of problem for him right the way through his life, and it made him, I think, terribly practical and quite hardheaded about making sure he’d make the right decisions. Family moved then from Independence to Kansas City, and the reason he went to Kansas City is that his father went bankrupt in 1903 and had to take a job as a night watchman in a grain silo. So, the family was poor, actually his dad had great pride, he was quite humiliated as what he was having to do to try and keep his family supported and to keep his family going in these circumstances and really, you see right at the beginning, Harry’s a very bright lad.

He, you know, as I said, part of the reason they moved to Independence was to give him options, more schooling, and they wanted him to do well at school and they wanted him to either go on to university or college or ideally, you know, potentially into the military. Well, for a start off, the problem is the military, despite being considered for West Point, his eyesight was atrocious, he had huge problems with his eyesight and he had the proverbial kind of really thick glasses that he needed to see anything, so the military, despite it being one of the things he would’ve really liked to have done, is out almost immediately from going into the Army as a profession, however, the other thing is he is certainly bright enough, he’s probably certainly one of the best read Presidents in history, the joke was he, by the time he was in his teens, he had read every single book in the local library. He is basically really, really keen to learn, but has very little options and particularly when the family has so little money, so he can’t go to university, he can’t leave the family because he also has to provide income to be able to support the family, but he also just hasn’t got the options that a lot of other Presidents will have had. What’s interesting is since 1900, he’s the only President that hasn’t been to university, so, you know, that’s a really interesting piece of background around him, which I think is kind of helps make him that kind of aspirational figure.

He could have easily just sat back, stayed on the farm, but he didn’t and he works, he helps support his family and he really wants to do, you know, to get involved with more politics, but he’s struggling and he really looks and worries around what family is going to be about and in 1914 his father dies and he, Harry quits the job that he’s taken 10 years before as a bank clerk and basically goes and works on the farm. So, you look at this, he’s, you know, he’s a bank clerk, 10 years working at the local bank, earning money to help support his family and then when his dad dies, he does that thing of he can’t leave his mother and his sister to look after the farm completely and he goes back to work the farm. You know, this is kind of 19th century America stuff, you don’t really expect this in so much 20th century for Presidents in terms of their backgrounds, so that’s something that I think you’re starting to see character here, and I would say that character is the bit that is, that you could see why Harry Truman becomes such an effective and such a good President is because he’s got that moral rectitude and he does the right thing. 1914, he goes back to home and in three years later war is declared. Now, as I said, he wanted to be in the Army and he wasn’t allowed and he, despite being two years older than the draught age, he was 33 years old in 1917, he tries to go into the Army and the story goes that he does the physical and he passes all the bits of the physical, but they make him take his glasses off and he looks at the board and the board basically, he can’t see a damn word of it, so he fails the eye test and therefore fails the medical.

So, what he does was he goes away, he gets hold of a copy of the eye test, which, you know, is all printed like that and everybody has, you know, have to get on with them, and he gets hold of one and he learns it completely by heart and he goes back and he takes the medical again and they take his glasses off and he goes, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, right the way down and passes the eye test. Now, on one hand, I suppose you could argue that’s unethical, he shouldn’t have done it, but actually he wants to fight for his country and he wants to support his country and he goes off to France, and I think this is what’s fascinating about him, he kind of gets in that last year of the war, and he’s the first lieutenant of a battalion battery group. The First World War, as I’m sure all of you know, was incredibly brutal in the trenches, the worst of it had probably happened in 1915, ‘16, but it was still awful, and he commanded a brave group of men and very, very successfully, and he actually is, comes over as a genuinely well-liked and well-supported by his men. There’s lots of incidences of sort of insubordination against other captains, et cetera, but none of that with Truman, he was fair, he was tough and very well liked, and interestingly, he makes two of his most important friendships of his life.

If you think about it, up until this point, he’s a small town boy, he’s barely gone out of Missouri and he’s been shipped across to France and he’s meeting people from all over America and he’s really starting to learn, kind of widen his horizons, I think is a phrase I’d like to sort of say, but he also makes two really good friends and they become really important in his future. First of all is Eddie Jacobson, who he works in the canteen with, and when they come back to Missouri after the war, they set up business together. That lovely old phrase, they were, they set up a haberdashery. Now, I don’t know, in America or in Britain we, haberdashery is a word that I only ever hear is if you hear a repeat of “Are You Being Served?” It’s one of those things that they talk about, the elevator going left, going up and down, but it’s not a word that’s very common now. So, they set up a haberdashery and initially it goes very well. There’s a bit of a post-war boom, people have more disposable income. Harry Truman is always famously very well dressed, makes a real effort to show the wares of his store and they do brilliantly well, but then there is a downturn and there’s a slump in the early 1920’s in the economy and, of course, clothing, you know, is one of those things that you can always put off to next year and the shop starts to do badly.

He and Eddie carry on working at it, but eventually it goes bust and it takes Harry Truman 15 years to pay off the debts that he accumulates trying to keep the store afloat. At one point he talks about the fact that it took all the money he had and all the money he could borrow to keep it going and it still didn’t work, and interestingly, he didn’t walk away from his debt and his obligations, he just spent a long time paying those debts back and it was obviously, it was used against him politically later on in life saying, you know, he was a failed businessman, but there is something about that, going through something and not walking away and really trying to make it work, that I think is character building and I think that is something that probably was a horrific experience to go through. Anybody who’s ever had those levels of financial difficulties will be able to say that’s a nightmare situation to be in. So, he’s now in the early 1920’s, he’s a failed businessman, for argument’s sake, and he’s wondering what to do, and this is where the other friendship comes to play. One of his fellow soldiers was a guy called Jim Pendergast, and he comes with his Uncle Mike, sorry, with his dad, Mike Pendergast, and says to Harry, “Why don’t you run for the judgeship of eastern Jackson County?” Jackson County is the part of Missouri where they live.

Now, judge isn’t judge in the way that a lot of people will think, judge in a way is more of a town counsellor, it’s more of a deciding where the bridges are, whether the roads get built, et cetera, et cetera, so it’s not a judicial appointment, it’s an elected appointment that has regional responsibility, and Truman’s at the point where, well, wow, that’s a proper job, he gets paid and his interest in politics, he’d first gone in 1900 to see that Kansas City had hosted the Democrat Congress that year for the Presidential election of 1900 and he’d gone with his dad to see it, and so obviously politics is an interest at this point, but this wasn’t, it was a political role, but it was predominantly a doing role, it was running stuff. Anyway, he wins, he wins quite handily, and interestingly, he always talks about his friend’s father, Mike Pendergast. Now here’s the thing, Mike Pendergast isn’t the really big player in Missouri politics, Ted Pendergast, who was his brother, Jim Pendergast’s uncle, is the massive machine politician for Missouri and he’s somebody that has got control or is a classic big city democrat boss of the 19th and early 20th century and that’s the association that hampers and helps Truman right the way through his formative career, his political career. He always tries to give credit mostly to Mike Pendergast, but in reality it was Ted that really mattered in terms of how you’re going to actually do well in Missouri politics and actually beyond Missouri.

Anyway, two year post, a judgeship, he likes it, he enjoys it, he’s very good at it, he’s very incorruptible, he’s very diligent and he goes up for re-election in 1926. It’s a midterm election and as often happens in midterms, the party the President gets, there’s a, anyway, long and short of it, he gets kicked out of office. It’s quite upsetting, that’s the only loss he ever suffers in an election ever in his life, there’s quite a few close run things, but he gets kicked out of office and he then has to spend the next two years selling memberships to the Kansas City Automobile Association. So again, these aren’t jobs you think future Presidents are going to have, you know, basically bank clerk, farmer salesman in his late 30’s of memberships from a car association, it’s not presidential really, is it? It’s not like, “I ran, you know, Massachusetts” or “I was chief executive of General Motors.” Anyway, two years later, the Pendergast’s come back and say, “Right, we think you did well last time, we think you’re going to do better this time and we actually want you to run for Chief Judge of Jackson County” and that’s like the head of the whole of the county and he’s really up for it, but there’s a race, he gets the nomination, he gets the support of the Pendergast machine and he wins handily, and in fact he wins handily for the four year term and he wins re-election again in 1930. He establishes a really good reputation of a nuts and bolts workaday politician. It’s interesting, these judgeships, from what I can make of it, it’s sort of maybe about 20% political but 80% administrative, it’s not about going out and making big speeches and doing all of that type of stuff, it is very much nuts and bolts. You know, raising money for new roads, making sure that things happen, really, really underpinning how society is going to work in their local, for doing right by the local community and he was very, very good at it. So, you get to 1934 and he’s done eight years as Chief Judge of the county, and he’s got other aspirations now, however, and take a slight detour, because what is important is to remember who he is married to.

Now the quote is quite a shocking one, that’s Bess Truman on her view of what a First Lady should do, but I think for me, what I find fascinating is this is one of the great romances and the great love stories of American Presidential history. More often than not, American Presidents are not necessarily the most faithful characters to their spouses, it’s usually a bit torrid. There’s some great love affairs, but there’s quite a lot that aren’t and this one I really do think is in the category of something that’s terribly, terribly sweet. They met when he was six and she was five, he sat behind her in class, he fell in love with her and they started dating in 1910. In 1911, he proposed to her, she said no, and she kept on saying no and in 1917 he goes off to war, he writes to her every day and her family more well-to-do, which isn’t difficult given his family background, well-to-do, and don’t really approve of him. They think that Bess could do better but when he comes back from the war in 1919, they get married. They move in eventually to his mother-in-law’s place and end up living with his mother-in-law for the rest of her life. She moves to the White House with them and there’s a lovely thing that made me laugh just about mother-in-laws, due respect to anybody in the audience who’s a mother-in-law, is that even, she dies in 1952 after the election and before they hand over to Truman, sorry, Truman hands over to Eisenhower, and there’s a lovely little quote going, “Even to the end, Mrs. Wallace”, Bess Wallace’s mother, “still always gave the impression that Bess could’ve done better”, and I could understand that in about the 1910’s when he’s a bank clerk, when he’s a farmer and et cetera, et cetera, being demoted from the Army and et cetera, but you think when, just as you’re leaving the White House, having been a two term President, you’d think you’d give him some slack, but apparently not.

Apparently Mrs. Wallace was not of that ilk. It was, they had one child, Margaret Truman, who was just the apple of her father’s eye and he got into famous fights over her and so when somebody criticised one of the novels that she wrote, he threatened to give them a black eye. She becomes a very famous novelist and Dad will do anything to promote her and it’s a great sort of relationship of how a dad will protect a daughter, which I think is terribly sweet, but Bess Wallace, who just literally had this lad sit behind her, that’s primary school, and went right the way through, ends up as First Lady, not what she signed up for, I don’t think quite a lot of First Ladies expect that it’s going to be what they sign up for, but she does a great job as First Lady, very dutiful First Lady, but I think it’s just something that I think we’re thinking about, she’s very much his background. She’s not political, she really doesn’t care too much about politics, but what she cares about is supporting Harry and she makes sure that Harry is looked after and makes sure that Margaret is protected, et cetera, and it’s maybe an old-fashioned view, but she was definitely a woman of her times in that respect and was somebody that I think made him a better President. He had somebody he could rely on and go home to when he had first faced some of the most difficult decisions the Presidents had. So, he gets to 1934 and in 1934 he could run again, but he now is getting itchy feet and he decides that he would like to go for the Democrat nomination for the 10th Congressional District in Missouri.

So, that’s House of Representatives, et cetera, but the Pendergast’s had already had other ideas, they’d already promised that seat, it was a Democrat voting seat, so it was like, and the machine and Ted Pendergast decided it was going to somebody else and bizarrely, and talk about little quirks, so he would’ve been happy to being a Congressman, that’s where his aspirations were, and Ted Pendergast had gone to three or four other people about the Senate seat that was coming up at that time, and those other people all turned him down and said, “I’m not interested in going to Washington, I don’t want to be a Senator”, et cetera, and he went to Harry Truman and said, “I know you want to be a Congressman, but why don’t you go and be a Senator and we can give you support for that seat and you’ll hopefully win it?”, and Harry Truman went, “Yeah, all right, I suppose. I hadn’t really been thinking of the Senate”, and obviously I know they’re meant to be co-equal houses, but Senators have quite a lot more prestige and you’re only one of, at that point, 96 Senators, whereas there’s 435 congressmen, et cetera, and he runs and he wins, wins quite nicely, the machine goes behind him, ensures he gets elected, but there comes a Faustian pact with it. He’s often known as the Senator of the Pendergast’s where he’s associated with the corruption and the problems of Missouri politics, and that’s not just Missouri, by the way, there were a lot of other states around this time where machine politics was very prevalent, but it tarnishes him.

The first term, six year term as a Senator, he is remarkably uninspiring. Achieves little bits, sits on committees, helps sponsor bits of legislation, but nothing memorable and then he suffers quite a blow. In 1939 Pendergast gets sent to prison for tax fraud and that, just as he’s going into re-election that year in 1940, is not the backdrop you want as your major sponsor. He tries to dismiss it, et cetera, and then what happens is it’s going to be a Democrat seat and as long as he can retain the Democrat nomination, he’s going to beat the Republican. Ah, suddenly the incumbent Missouri governor, Lloyd Stark, decides he’s going to challenge Truman for the Democrat nomination. Obviously popular incumbent governor going to be, you know, Truman a little bit tarnished, not exactly charismatic, Stark is quite a charismatic politician, very much a backslapping glad-hander, and Truman’s in trouble, and as a result it’s a really tight run race. People assume that Stark is going to beat Truman and therefore he will lose his seat and he faces in 1940, he will face being out of a job yet again in his life. Truman fights like a madman. He travels, he gets in his car, travels around the whole state, glad-handing, really working the state to make sure that he wins the nomination and he wins the nomination by 51 to 49, a hair’s breadth. In 1940 he could have been a former Senator, but he just hangs on there then wins the re-election comfortably, but he’s that close to losing all of his political clout. One of the things, oh, by the way, and this is a really interesting kind of quirk of fate, is Stark could have been backed by FDR. Truman had not impressed Roosevelt particularly and had decided then Stark was much more of an FDR man even though Truman had voted solidly for all the New Deal legislation right the way through, and so the relationship obviously wasn’t that close, but the interesting byproduct of having to fight this race was going all around Missouri.

He’d gone to various munitions plants and armament plants, obviously America’s starting to gear up, he doesn’t want to go into the war but there’s now a move to start developing more arms and getting on more of a war footing, and he realises there’s a lot of inefficiencies and a lot of problems in these and he goes, basically, back to Washington after he’s been re-elected and says, “I would like to start a committee to look into procurement.” It sounds like the un-sexiest thing in the history of the world and a special committee to investigate National Defence Programme, and he sets this up, gets FDR’S blessing, and starts to travel all around the country checking in on procurement and making sure contracts are being honoured, et cetera. Dull as ditch water except it’s estimated that by 1944 that committee had saved the American taxpayer over $15,000,000,000, which in those times is an enormous amount of money. Also, by 1941 America’s in the war, so therefore, you’re not just talking about value for money, you are talking about quality arms supporting the soldiers, so you don’t have guns that don’t fire properly, you don’t have tanks that get stuck, all of those things, it wasn’t just about saving money, but it was also about quality. So much so, that “Time Magazine” in 1943 has Truman on the front cover with, “Investigator Truman, that a democracy has to keep its eye on the ball”, and it makes him a moderate celebrity, not a massive celebrity, but his name is suddenly is talked about more.

As I said, for in a sense unglamorous work that captures the zeitgeist, but he does it, again, for honourable reasons, he doesn’t do it, he could’ve done a lot more things that would’ve got him a lot more prestige, but this one was like, “Well, this needs to be done for the country.” War has started, he tries to enlist again. He’s now way into his 50’s and actually General Marshall, who eventually becomes his Secretary of State, General Marshall turns around to him and goes, “We don’t need old stiffs like you in the Army, this is a young man’s war. Get to Congress and try and give us all the support we can do”, and he goes, “Right, okay, I’ll do that”, and for the next three years, four years, he spends his time in Congress supporting the Army, making sure things are procured right and this is the bit that’s interesting, you know, in 1946, would he have stood for election again? Maybe? The six year senate cycle would’ve been 1946, he obviously had never had Presidential or any sort of major aspirations, but he suddenly becomes in contention. So, going back to what I was saying about FDR’s unusual tenure, so FDR’s the only President in history who’s been elected four times, interestingly, during Truman’s term as President, the 22nd Amendment is passed which prohibits Presidents for being more than two terms, running or winning elections twice apart from there was a nice little grandfather clause where it would’ve allowed Harry Truman as an incumbent to do it one last time.

They, FDR wins four times, that had broken an unwritten rule, the Presidents would only run twice, which goes right back to George Washington, right at the beginning he’d said, “We don’t want to elect a monarchy, what we need to do is break”, and everybody honoured that pretty much up until that point. A couple of people had tried to get a third nomination but had failed. So, FDR not only does that, so he, when in 1932, when he’s elected for the first time, he has John Nance Garner, “Bucket of warm spit”, John Nance Garner, who is speaker of the House from Texas, Cactus Jack, and they are very different, a patrician, man of, you know, the working class, the two of them work well together, Garner gets more and more frustrated. He’s been incredibly powerful as a speaker and now he’s a kind of an also ran, but there’s a real falling out in the late 1930’s. He’s not a great fan of the Supreme Court packing attempt that FDR tries to do in the mid '30’s, but he’s really against Truman running again and actually has aspirations, sorry, not Truman, FDR, running again for a third time, he thinks that shouldn’t happen. Now he does it from a responsible point of view, he goes, “They’re the rules we’ve always run by”, but he also wants to be President, so therefore he has, they have a big falling out, he runs against FDR for the nomination, fails abysmally and basically packs off and goes back to Texas. He’s replaced by one of FDR’s closer friends in the cabinet, a guy called Henry Wallace. Henry Wallace does the job for four years, he is kind of not trusted.

He’s trusted by FDR, but he’s not trusted by the party and they think he’s too left wing, he’s too airy fairy, he’s not going to, and by this point, they’re also starting to worry, as you do, that Vice Presidents can become Presidents and the party genuinely does not want to have a President who’s like Wallace, they think it’ll be a disaster for the party, will not hold together the coalition which the Democrat party was under FDR. So, they force against FDR’s will, they force to say, “You’re not having him. We’ll give you a fourth nomination, of course we will, but you’re not having Wallace, that’s the price of it”, and bizarrely, I mean, what surprises me is FDR is forced to go with it, the party actually overrides FDR. You’d think by this point FDR is all commanding, but this is the bit where they draw the line and he has to give in. Then there’s a lot of toing and froing, “Well, who’s it going to be?” FDR is slightly annoyed that he’s not had his person chosen and is quite ambivalent about various choices and in the long and short of the way is they go round and round in circles for a good few weeks leading up to the convention to say who should it be? “Should it be one of the Supreme Court justices? Should it be another member of the cabinet? Should it be this person, that person?”, and I’ve yet to read a really convincing of account how the Senator from Missouri becomes the Vice Presidential candidate. In a way, there’s lots of different versions.

This person was ruled out because of this, this person wasn’t supported by this group, this person couldn’t resign from the Supreme Court. Harry Truman, literally in my view, was the person who didn’t have enemies, that basically was a good, solid, upstanding person that they could see being Vice President but didn’t have to worry about, whereas everybody else who was more charismatic, more powerful, et cetera, had a significant drawback or a significant part of the party who was against them. So, Harry Truman arguably is the ultimate compromise candidate, and he’s quite ambivalent about this, as well. He’s not that keen at all to become President, ah, Vice President, and he is also, very obviously, if you are seeing by this point FDR is worn out, he’s really not well, Truman is eventually basically honoured into, “You’ve got to do this for the good of the party”, et cetera, et cetera. FDR makes the famous phone call that basically said, “Are you going to be responsible for splitting the party or are you going to do your duty for the country?”, and he’s like, “Oh, well, if you say it that way, I’m going to do my duty.” So, FDR has him as his fourth Vice, so third Vice President for the final term. The campaign is interesting, it’s all about FDR. Harry Truman is irrelevant, nobody’s going to vote for the Democrats because Harry Truman’s the Vice Presidential candidate, but they are going to vote for the President and for two reasons, FDR does very little campaigning. One, he’s running the war and the country, and secondly, he’s ill, and Truman barnstorms around the country, travels right around the country campaigning on behalf of the ticket.

They win another very substantial landslide, the smallest of FDRs four landslides, but still a landslide by any other description, and he becomes Vice President. His Vice Presidency is very short, 82 days, he manages in that time to court two bits of controversy. First of all, Ted Pendergast dies. He’s been released from jail after having served his time for fraud and Truman goes to his funeral because it’s the right thing to do. He might be a convicted criminal, et cetera, et cetera, but you do the right thing and I think that was controversial at the time, and it could easily not been done, he could have been busy in a different way, and he knew he was making a choice that would be controversial, but again, Harry Truman, I think in a sign of values was saying, “No, but I will do, somebody who supported me, I will do right by them.” Then the other one, which I find more amusing, is this one. Very, very good piano player, Harry Truman, lovely photograph years later when John F. Kennedy’s in the White House and John F. Kennedy invites Harry Truman back to play for a crowd and it’s marvellous, anyway, he’s a fabulous piano player and I just love this quote, I think it’s, he has a wry sense of humour, Harry Truman, “My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician, and to tell you the truth, there’s hardly any difference.” He’s got Lauren Bacall on top of the piano, it was entertaining the troops, it caused enormous, “How dare the Vice President do such a thing. It’s disgraceful”, et cetera, et cetera, but apparently that, he didn’t care, but apparently he got hell from Bess afterwards.

He goes, “Gee”, and he was banned from playing piano in public afterward by Bess, she wasn’t having a philandering with Lauren Bacall and those types of people, but I think it was a lovely thing, so that was the sumtotal of it. He barely meets FDR, he meets FDR, literally, less than a handful of occasions. Each time he worries about how ill he is. FDR despite everything, spends no time preparing. I think FDR, on one hand, knew he was dying or knew he was very ill and instead of preparing his successor, I think he was probably in denial about it. Now, that’s my view, lots of scholars would say, “No, this wasn’t the case, he was too busy” or whatever, but I think for many great things about FDR, one of the things I would say, I would criticise him for, is any great leadership will prepare for what’s after. You know, the famous President De Gaulle quote, “Apres moi, le deluge”. Well, that’s just grandiosity, that’s, you know, just, “I am irreplaceable”, and well, if you’re trying to sustain a legacy, if you’re trying to do right by the organisation or the country that you are in charge of, you should try and prepare for the next stage, and very clearly, FDR was not helping Harry Truman prepare. Famously Harry Truman did not know the nuclear bombs existed, Harry Truman was not included in any of the discussions about most things.

In fact, most of the time what he did was he would leave the White House, go back over to Congress and he would hang out with his old mates from, you know, he presided over the Senate, which is technically his job, but that was a kind of honorarium job, honorary job rather, and then famously on the 12th of April, he’s been presiding over the Senate in the morning and he then goes over to Sam Rayburn who’s a great friend, who’s the Speaker of the House, and he decides to go and have lunch with Sam Raburn, he gets to Sam Rayburn’s office, he’s managed to shake his Secret Service detail, so he is on his own, and Rayburn’s office gets this mad phone call saying, “The Vice President has to come and see the First Lady”, and he thinks, “All right, there’s something up here”, tells everybody, “Don’t say anything. I’m going to head back to the White House”, gets a car back.

Again, this man is now President of the United States, although he doesn’t know it, and he hasn’t got a Secret Service detail with him or anything, gets back to the White House and meets with, gets ushered up to meet the First Lady. FDR had been down in Warm Springs in Georgia, convalescing, he’d had a massive cerebral haemorrhage that morning, and he gets ushered in to meet the First Lady and is told that the President is dead and that he’s now President of the United States. In typical Harry Truman’s style the first thing he’s said to Eleanor Roosevelt is, “Is there anything I can do for you, Ma'am?” and she turns around to him and goes, “No, Harry, we’re the ones that need to support you now.” So, it’s fascinating, it’s a fascinating kind of prelude to him becoming President and then he’s thrown into a maelstrom of end of the war, post-war, all of the things that in about 12 days I’ll be talking to about, about the challenges Harry Truman faced, but this is about the building of the character and the background. I don’t have a conclusive answer to why he is who he is in terms of being a great President. I think there’s some things about duty and honour, but there’s also stuff about just values. I think he is a great man, but I still look and go, bank clerk, farmer, soldier, failed haberdasher, there’s nothing there that shows the greatness that he would come to and maybe it’s the role, maybe it’s the things like that. Rob, I said I’d take questions and I would like to just check the Q&A, but I haven’t got much time, so I understand that people might need to dive off. So, I haven’t had a chance-

• Mark?

• [Mark] Yeah-

• This is Gretchen, this is Gretchen, we are asking for you-

• Yes.

• [Gretchen] Questions, thank you.

• Right, So shall I have a quick look at the Q&A?

Q&A and Comments:

I’ve got a few about weather in various places, hang on, yes, so there’s questions about, there’s a question from Michael about he recognises the State of Israel and then Zionism, that’s one of the things I’ll be discussing in a couple of weeks time.

So, I’m going to start looking at Truman as a President then, but interestingly, there’s a lot of questions about Eddie Jacobson, his business partner and his friend from the Army, he was Jewish, and actually Truman is meant to have got to understand Jewish faith and the importance of Israel, that they put that as one of the things that he went against State Department advice, et cetera, because he felt he knew why it was such an important issue. So, I’ll come back to that a little later, I’m not shying from the question.

“I’ve read because of Lyndon Johnson’s clout in the Senate Kennedy’s policy was passed.” Oh, I don’t, yeah, Arlene, I didn’t mean to denigrate it. FDR is, not FDR, sorry, LBJ is a really interesting character, I think a catastrophic President in terms of foreign policy, I think Vietnam was a disaster and ultimately fails to get him a final term in office, however, I think his abilities in domestic policy were second to none. What I was actually saying, really, was that he loses, he doesn’t get a chance for re-election in '68 because of his foreign policy has turned out to be so disastrous, but I think that there’s no better domestic policy President in terms of getting his agenda through than LBJ.

Yeah, that Warren says that the relationship with FDR was almost non-existent, yet he only met a few times. You’re right, they had met prior to him taking the Vice Presidency, but it was on a very transactional, kind of cordial basis. He went to ask about setting up this commission around armaments, et cetera, et cetera, but there was no close relationship at all and I think it is odd 'cause you kind of think that they should work closely together and I think this is one that you look back in history and go, “That’s the reason you need to work closely together”, and Eisenhower, to his credit, was very good about including Richard Nixon as his Vice President in, he was always attending cabinet meetings, he always had a briefing every week, basically that Eisenhower really understood you’ve got to ensure that you have a successor who’s properly briefed. Of course, Truman didn’t get that for the first three and a half years because there was no Vice President. The 25th Amendment hadn’t been passed and there was no Vice President to brief. It wasn’t until he gets re-elected in '48 on his own account that he has a Vice President, so work with the American political systems.

No, on my Malcomson’s are, sorry, that’s a nice question about where am I from Southern Ireland. Actually no, my bits tends to be the north of England and a little bit of Scotland, but thank you for asking, and but yes, actually I love the quotes from Sandy about Cincinnatus left office and went back to his farm. Actually, to be honest, I think that’s a good description in a way of Harry Truman. He goes back to Independence, Missouri, he answers his correspondence, he sets up his library and I think he is a great example of statesman and I think it does go back to this, and he had no money. He didn’t make money from being a politician. In fact, he could have probably made, well, as I said, he wasn’t a great businessman, but it wasn’t, the only time he ever got financial security in his life was when he signed the contract to write his memoirs and that was the first time he was ever able to go really on solid ground.

Then, yeah, sorry, oh, interesting, Arlene’s saying about John Nance Garner’s the neighbour of grandparents in Texas. I think he’s a fascinating character, I think Texas produces larger than life characters, it always does, and I think he would’ve been a very interesting, in the parallel universe, those bits of alternative histories of had Garner stayed as Vice President or had Henry Wallace not been thrown off the ticket makes a very, very interesting parallel universe about what would’ve happened.

Right, I think I’m going to leave it at that if everybody’s all right and thank you very much for joining me tonight. Hopefully, I think it’s on the 30th, I’m going to do the challenges of Harry Truman’s Presidency, but hopefully you’ll have had a chance to get a little bit of context.