Harry S. Truman Trying to make the right call EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio. DAVID MCCULLOUGH: I grew up in a very Republican family, and the night of the '48 election, I was 15. I was in high school, and I was very interested in politics. And I wanted to stay up to hear who won, but the final count didn't come in until something like 2:00 in the morning. I fell asleep, and the next morning my father was in shaving, and I ran in. I said, 'Dad, Dad -- who won?' And he said, 'Truman,' in a deep, sorrowful voice, like it was the end of the world. About 25, 30 years later, I was back home in Pittsburgh, where I grew up, and my father and I were having a nice chat after dinner. And he was going on about how the world was going to hell, and the country was going to hell. Then, he paused and he said, 'Too bad old Harry isn’t still in the White House.' We see things differently as time goes on, and that's the nature of reality. Truman, himself, said, 'You have to wait for the dust to settle.' And he was right. You do. If you were ranking Truman in the last months or year of his presidency, you'd rank him pretty low. But as the dust has settled over the last 50 years and more, we see now that Harry Truman was a very important and effective and admirable president -- a man who never wanted the job, never imagined he'd be in the job. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That's biographer David McCullough. And I'm Lillian Cunningham with The Washington Post. This is the 32nd episode of “Presidential.” PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: This episode is about the imperfect art of making decisions that hold up over time. Predictions. Judgment calls. It's an episode, I hope, about what it takes to try to see the future and to make a decision in the moment that will put you ultimately on the right side of history. So, there are a couple ways we are going to explore this with Harry Truman. One is by looking at some of his biggest and most controversial decisions in the White House. And then another is by Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 looking at the biggest polling miscalculation in American presidential history -- and that was Truman's election in 1948, when just about everyone predicted incorrectly that he was going to lose. So, I have two featured guests this week: David McCullough, the historian and biographer who wrote the book “Truman,” and Scott Clement, who's the head of polling for The Washington Post. I'm going to kick it off first with David McCullough, who was also on our John Adams episode and our Theodore Roosevelt episode. DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Yes, this is David speaking from our home in Boston. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And you've written biographies of all three of these presidents, David. So, is there something that binds your interest in these three men? Something that you saw shared at the heart of all three of these presidencies? DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Well, I think that Adams, Harry Truman and Theodore Roosevelt all had a very strong sense of history. They were well read in history. And with that came a sense of cause and effect -- what's the right decision for the country in the long run? And to me, Adams and Truman, in particular, are presidents who were preceded by and then followed by taller, more glamorous, more celebrated presidents. In the case of Adams, it was Washington and then Jefferson. With Truman, it was Roosevelt and then Eisenhower. And I felt that these were two extremely important and interesting presidents. But beyond that, they're great stories -- great American stories from birth to death. Both Adams and Truman came from very modest, you might even say obscure, backgrounds. And one would not think that they could rise to be and do what they did. But they did. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, this seems like a good place to start with a bit about his early story. Harry S. Truman was born in 1884 in the tiny frontier town of Lamar, Missouri. And interestingly the 'S' in his name doesn't actually stand for anything. It is just 'S. Harry S. Truman had one of those sort of classic, modest upbringings stories. He helped his family run their farm, and they were often in a lot of financial difficulty. He had famously bad eyesight. And so, he was a shy, kind of awkward, introverted boy. And you know, then like many of these stories go, his father died when Truman was about 20-years old. DAVID MCCULLOUGH: By our standards, Harry Truman grew up with no advantages at all. Truman never went to college, but that should never be a sign that he was not well read or interested in history or interested in learning. He wasn't brilliant, and he didn't have the capacity to express himself in words that some of the others had. But he had a very good mind. Very few people in his time -- or even since -- ever, ever imagine that Harry Truman read Latin for pleasure, for example, or that he would go to hear the National Symphony whenever he could, but also whenever they were playing one of his favorite composers, like Mozart. And if they were to play somebody like Mozart, he would take the score with him. That's not the Harry Truman that everybody popularly thinks of. Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: One of the things that he would get sometimes ridiculed about was his devotion to his mother. Tell me a little bit about how that relationship, you think, shaped who he is. DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Well, I did a piece years ago on mama's boys, picking people from various walks of life -- Frank Lloyd Wright, General MacArthur, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson. And I came to the conclusion that whether or not being a mama's boy is good or bad for you depends almost entirely on what kind of a person mama was. Truman's mother was not a mother who spoiled her children. She required that they live up to certain standards and behave a certain way. But she also had backbone. She believed in speaking the truth, speaking directly. She believed in the old hard-rock Midwestern American virtues and values and conveyed that to him. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Truman held a hodge podge of jobs in his youth. He worked for a construction company. He worked as a bank clerk. He joined the National Guard. He ended up serving actually as a soldier in France during World War II. And after his military service, he came back to Missouri and he married his childhood sweetheart, Bess. He also then started a men's clothing store with his friend in Kansas City before it failed. So, it's around 1922 when he first starts to dip his toe into politics. And he runs for a judgeship in [Missouri] with the support of the Democratic Party boss of Kansas City, who later ends up in prison. But, anyway, time passes. He serves in these various judgeships. And in 1934, Truman won a seat in the U.S. Senate and he moved to Washington D.C. When he's in the Senate, he's not a particularly standout politician, but some of his notable involvement was with revamping transportation regulations, with helping set up the framework for the airline industry to grow. So, on the whole, he's not making a bunch of waves in the Senate, other than that he's just kind of a good Democrat supporting President Roosevelt's New Deal agenda at the time. And so, this fairly sparse, clean-good-Democrat record is why the Democratic Party decided that they should package Truman as vice president with FDR when FDR was running for his fourth term as president, in 1944. Truman did not seem to have a whole lot to offer the ticket. Mostly he just kind of seemed like someone who would keep out of the way. But that, of course, was not how things turned out. On April 12, 1945 -- so, this is just a couple months into Truman's vice presidency -- he gets called to the White House. And up until this point, he's had hardly any contact with President Roosevelt at all. He's not involved in any of the decision-making, doesn't see any of the process. And so, he's called into Eleanor Roosevelt's study. And she says to him, 'Harry, the president is dead.' And Truman says, 'Is there anything I can do for you?’ And Eleanor says back to him, 'Is there anything I can do for you? You're the one in trouble now.’ David, how did Truman approach this really immense task of taking over the presidency? I mean, not only is World War II at its climax, and Truman hasn't been clued in to any of the decision- making up until this point. But also, FDR was this charismatic, larger-than- life figure who'd been president for 12 years. So, how did Truman jump into this leadership void? Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Harry Truman never tried to talk like Franklin Roosevelt because he wanted to follow in Franklin Roosevelt's shoes.