For American voters, the rising prices of consumer goods was the biggest problem of all, the one they felt with their wallets on a daily basis. Treasury officials, banking officials, the president, and Republican leaders in Congress were at war over the issue of whether to stabilize prices by law. Should the federal government have the power to set the costs of steaks and nylon stockings?
In all of these issues: What was the right thing to do? And what was the politically popular thing to do?
Stuck between opposing forces, Truman saw his presidency weaken. He was ridiculed in cartoons, lambasted in opinion pieces. “It was a cruel time to put inexperience in power,” wrote the columnist Richard Rovere.
Truman alone held the key to the first nuclear arsenal. Never before had an American president controlled such awesome power. And yet, never before had one been so publicly emasculated. Meanwhile, prices of consumer goods continued to soar. The president’s approval rating dropped to 37 percent from 87 percent in just one year, as the 1946 midterm elections approached.
The pressure on the president was becoming nearly unbearable. At one point, Drew Pearson, the nation’s most popular political columnist, criticized Truman’s wife and daughter in a radio broadcast for traveling on a private railcar when soldiers were left off the train because seats were scarce. The accusation was untrue. When Pearson showed up to a White House press conference, Truman angrily confronted him. Secret Service agent Henry Nicholson was standing nearby. He recalled Pearson turning pale as Truman poked a finger into his abdomen.
“God damn you,” Truman said, “you call me what you want—thief, robber—but the next time you tell a falsehood about my wife I will punch you right in the nose, and don’t think I wouldn’t.”
3
“Can He Swing the Job?”
MILLIONS OF AMERICANS WERE STILL baffled as to how Truman had become president in the first place. “Here was a man who came into the White House almost as though he had been picked at random off the street,” recalled White House correspondent Robert Nixon. Truman had no college degree. He had never had the money to own his own home. He had never been the mayor of a city, never served as governor of a state. His presidency was the result of a chain of events so unlikely, only destiny could account for them. He himself would later say that he became the most powerful man in the world “by accident.”
He was born in Lamar, Missouri, on May 8, 1884. His father was a farmer and mule trader; his mother was a crack shot with a rifle and remarkably educated for a farm woman reared in the nineteenth century. The Truman home had no plumbing. By the time Harry was in school, the family had moved to Independence, Missouri, to a home that had electricity, and Harry had two siblings—a brother named John Vivian and a sister named Mary Jane.
As a boy, he found three passions that would guide his personal and political future. The first was Elizabeth “Bess” Wallace. “When I was about six or seven years old,” he would recollect, “my mother took me to Sunday School and I saw there the prettiest sweetheart little girl I’d ever seen . . . She had tanned skin, blond hair, golden as sunshine, and the most beautiful blue eyes.”
For the rest of Truman’s days, Bess would be the focus of his emotional life. It would take years of courting before the object of his devotion would pay any attention to Harry. Her family belonged to Independence’s social elite, while the Trumans were farm people. A family friend would remember Bess’s mother saying, “You don’t want to marry that farm boy, he is not going to make it anywhere.’”
Truman’s second passion was reading. Around the time he first laid eyes on his future bride, he contracted diphtheria. “He ended up being paralyzed for about a year,” recalled Harry’s sister, Mary Jane. “So, that’s when he started reading so much. He couldn’t do anything else and he couldn’t get up without help, and so he’d lie on the floor and put books down on the floor in front of him and read the book that way.” He became obsessed with history and the leaders who had shaped it, from Moses and Hannibal to Ulysses S. Grant and George Washington.
Truman’s third passion was politics. As his daughter, Margaret, would later write, “You have to understand how profoundly the Trumans identify with the word Democrat.”
The Truman family considered themselves “Rebel Democrats,” tracing their political identities back to the Civil War. Both of Harry’s parents came from slave-owning families who sided with the South. Truman’s mother often told the story of how, when she was a child, Union loyalists known as Jayhawkers had raided her family’s farm, killing the farm animals and burning the family home to the ground. For many families like the Trumans, in places like Missouri and to the south, the Union army and President Abraham Lincoln became inextricably linked to the Republican Party. The Trumans saw their party affiliation as an obsession born of a lost war. Their devotion to the Democratic Party was unquestioned, like the color of their skin.
“Democrats were not made by campaign promises and rational debate, in Independence,” Margaret Truman later wrote. “They were born.”
Were it not for a world war, Truman would probably never have left the farm, nor gotten married. Here is where destiny intervened for the first time in his life. In April 1917, when the United States entered World War I, he was thirty-three years old. On March 30, 1918, he sailed for France, a lieutenant in the US Army’s 129th Field Artillery Regiment, Thirty-Fifth Division. By the time his group, Battery D (194 men), made it to the front lines, Truman had been elevated to captain, due
