Volume 33, Number 19 · December 4, 1986
Not So Common Man
By Kenneth S. Davis
Truman: The Rise to Power
by Richard Lawrence Miller
McGraw-Hill, 536 pp., $19.95
Bess W. Truman
by Margaret Truman
Macmillan, 445 pp., $19.95
Truman
by Roy Jenkins
Harper and Row, 232 pp., $17.95
Among the forty men who have been presidents of the United States, no one's reputation with the general public and with opinion makers, not even Richard Nixon's or Warren Harding's, has had wider fluctuations than Harry Truman's, starting with his eight years (minus three-and-a-half months) in the White House. Truman had everyone's sympathy when, as he said to reporters, 'the house, the stars and all the planets' fell on him with Roosevelt's death in April 1945, after he had been virtually forced by FDR into accepting the Democratic vice-presidential nomination nine months before. His modest demeanor and expressed determination to continue the 'Roosevelt policies' (if only he had been able to find out what they were!), and the record he had made in the Senate as chairman of a special committee to investigate the national defense program (his inquiries into war expenditures had saved hundreds of millions of tax dollars), resulted in an approval rating of 87 percent in the Gallup public opinion poll in mid-May 1945. This was 'three points higher than Roosevelt…ever achieved,' Roy Jenkins reminds us in Truman, a tightly composed portrait of a man he greatly admires.
Review, 6982 words
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