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.
