June 15, 1992
Cracker-barrel plain in speech and looks, this seemingly ordinary man turned out to be one of our most dynamic presidents. It was Harry S. Truman who ordered the atomic bomb dropped, halted Communists in Turkey and Greece, initiated the Marshall Plan, NATO and the Berlin Airlift, ordered desegregation of the armed forces, established the CIA and the Defense Department, committed U.S. forces to Korea and upheld the principle of civilian control over the military by firing Gen. Douglas MacArthur. McCullough ( Mornings on Horseback ) has written a surefooted, highly satisfying biography of the 33rd president, one that not only conveys in rich detail Truman's accomplishments as a politician and statesman, but also reveals the character and personality of this constantly-surprising man--as schoolboy, farmer, soldier, merchant, county judge, senator, vice president and chief executive. The book relates how Truman (1884-1972) overcame the stigma of business failure and debt (as well as the accusation that he was ``bellboy'' to Kansas City's Pendergast machine) and acquired a reputation for honesty, reliability and common sense. McCullough pays considerable attention to Truman's family, especially his fervent and touching courtship of Bess Wallace, the idolized love of his life. Her mother never felt Truman was good enough for her daughter, even after he became president. The book's re-creation of the 1948 presidential campaign, during which Newsweek 's poll of 50 political writers predicted that the incumbent would lose the election to Thomas Dewey, is the most complete account of that surprise victory to date. The book is an impressive tribute to a man whose brisk cheerfulness and self-confidence were combined with a God-fearing humility; a great and good man who, in McCullough's opinion, was a great president. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC main selection; History Book Club and QPB alternatives; author tour.
June 1, 1992
McCullough's life of Harry Truman is a Sandburg's Lincoln for the 1990s. Biographer of Theodore Roosevelt, historian of the Johnstown flood, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Panama Canal, clearly McCullough found not just a new subject but a hero too when he began research in 1982. As with Roosevelt in Mornings on Horseback ( LJ 5/15/81), he is concerned above all with defining Truman's character. With poetry and reverence he writes of the farmer, haberdasher, and local official whom accident and ambition raised to unprecedented power, yet who left the White House an American everyman. Skeptics uneasy with McCullough's Truman in mystic communion with America's spirit will recall the raw politics described by Richard Miller in Truman: The Rise to Power ( LJ 12/85). For detailed treatment of policy, scholars will often need a specialized monograph. Yet McCullough's Truman is not quite a saint, and his own scholarship is exhaustive in portraying Truman the man. No biography approaches the richness, depth, or grace of this one. For all libraries. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/92.-- Robert F. Nardini, North Chichester, N.H.
Copyright 1992 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from April 15, 1992
The haze of veneration that has come to surround Truman, both in the popular imagination and in politicians' sound-bite invocations of his memory, obscures the controversies--of the man's presidential decisions, of his common-man personality--that actually attended his occupation of the nation's highest office from 1945 to 1953. Yet when his life is laid bare and placed in the context of his rural upbringing, with all the cornball maxims he lived by--be honest, fair, loyal, cheerful, and hardworking--Truman truly merits the retrospective adulation. McCullough has done one helluva job researching and writing, and whatever other biographers of the man do in the future, it seems inconceivable that they will be able to improve on McCullough's account, particularly of Truman's career up to his first election to the Senate and later elevation to the vice presidency in 1944. Upon his birth in 1884, the particular viciousness of Missouri's civil war within the Civil War was a still-living, hearth-side memory. (During a visit to the White House years later, Harry teasingly asked his mother, who as a girl had been evicted and dispossessed by Union troops, if she wished to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.) Having established this and other parts of the family lore, McCullough takes us through the disappointments of late-blooming Harry's teens and twenties: dashed dreams of going to West Point or becoming a concert pianist, his (initially) unrequited courtship, and his shackling to the family farm. Stubbornly optimistic, he seized the opportunity to join the army in 1917, a decision of "his own doing entirely and the turning point in his life." That's because while captaining an artillery battery in Europe he fell in with Jim Pendergast, of Kansas City's notorious political machine, who afforded Truman his start in local and then state politics. McCullough concentrates on his subject's private life and public activity on the political stump (as distinct from analysis of domestic or foreign policy); the most vivid subsequent episodes here are the byzantine plot to put Truman's name on the ticket in 1944 and, of course, the legendary whistle-stop campaign of 1948. But these are but the apexes in a work of unstintingly high quality and historical integrity: the hero and this biographer defining an unbeatable combination. ((Reviewed Apr. 15, 1992))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1992, American Library Association.)