History and Harry Truman

I have just been reading a biography of Harry S. Truman --published in 2008, by Robert Dallek. Dallek has done other historical writing, such as on the relationship between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. The following is a slightly altered version of what I wrote about the book to a friend.

In copying and pasting and editing etc., the following text is a little ragged in places but I don't know how to fix it perfectly. Please overlook this!

Getting close to end of Truman bio.

Gave me a totally different idea of Truman than I had before.

He could be very combative but was really a pretty insecure guy..
.and why not, surrounded
by all sorts of devious enemies just within the Democratic Party.

He left office with extremely low approval ratings ( did you
know he could have run for a
third term? he would never have won against Eisenhower of course).

One of Truman's big weaknesses came when it came appointing
people to various positions.
He too often considered short term political reasons and not
really thinking through what
these people would do when they were appointed.

He did OK with Marshall and the Marshall Plan, of course,
but that was the exception
rather than the rule. The Berlin Airlift seems near brilliant in
retrospect.

And then there was just the threat of Communism and Stalin
and communists in the U.S.A.

Most American liberals were incredibly naive about Stalin..
.they literally would not have
believed that his Gulags existed the way they did.

(I have read Svetlana Stalin's books, and even if she was
influenced in the writing of
them by the CIA, all her talk about her father's nuttiness
and paranoia ring true. He was
always purging people and trying to play people off
against each other, with wild
fantasies of plots afoot to get rid of him).

Of course, I have read Solzhenitsyn and other Russian
writers too, including first person
accounts of the purges that began in the 1930's...

I feel history has judged Truman to have been a
better president than people thought in
his own time, though.

He still did a lot of stupid things...cannot enumerate
them all, but he was one to wield
presidential power like a club very often without
considering the full ramifications.

Also, it seems right after World War II people
in the U.S. were in a really volatile
mood...they felt they had sacrificed a lot and won
the war and expected to be rewarded in
all sorts of ways.

When they had inflation and other issues to
contend with, they just got mad at Truman...

Like a lot of people will get mad at Obama
because of rising gasoline prices.

Truman left office saying he didn't see why
anyone would want to be president. After
reading this book so far can certainly see why
he felt that way.

History has gone on to take a much better view
of Truman than people did when he was
in the White House...

A lot of historians now mark him as great or near great.
His "Fair Deal" platform, which
inspired Medicare, for instance, had to wait until
Johnson was president to be passed.

Truman would be as controversial in today's political
climate as he was in his own.

Ironically, when Truman chose not to run in 1952,
Eisenhower and Nixon's slogan was
"Time for a Change." Change. That sounds familiar.