TRUMAN: LEGACY LINGERS

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33110, 28 December 1972, Page 4

TRUMAN: LEGACY LINGERS

AZ Press Association —Copyright)

WASHINGTON.

The abilities of Mr Harry S. Truman, the thirtysecond President of the United States, were anything but common. But to many of his countrymen he had the common touch not always associated with high office.

He moulded the destiny of the United States with unprecedented decisions — the atomicbombing of Japan, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin blockade airlift, the sending of United States troops to Korea, and many more.

Fate permitted Mr Truman to outlive most of those with whom, as President, •he shared a place in history— Stalin, Churchill, de Gaulle, MacArthur and Eisenhower. He once said that a man could have no better epitaph than one he saw inscribed on a frontier grave in Arizona. It said: “Here lies Jack Williams: He done his damndest.” He was Vice-President the day that Franklin Roosevelt died, on April 12, 1945, and found himself holding the reins of the mightiest nation in the world at a very critical time.

He served until January 20, 1953, the day General Dwight Eisenhower succeeded him in the White House. During his years of decision and consequence, not only for the nation but the world, he gave the order to drop the atomic bombs that ended the war with Japan in the Pacific.

He gave the go-ahead for the development of the hydrogen bomb, called Russia’s bluff in Berlin and ordered an airlift to keep the city supplied with food and medicine despite a Soviet blockade.

‘Korea worst’

His most difficult decision, Mr Truman has said, was personally ordering troops into Korea in a “police action” that kept Communist troops from advancing past the 38th parallel. He enunciated the Truman doctrine to keep Russia out of Southern Europe, supported the Marshall Plan for economic aid to keep Russia out of Western Europe, presided at the birth of the United Nations and was a key mover in creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Truman had enemies. He was the object of an assassination attempt during his s? The “S.” in Harry S. Truman is the initial of a name upon which his parents could not agree. The certificate of his birth at Lamar, Missouri, shows only “Harry S. Truman.” Mr Truman told William Hillman, editor of “Mr President,” a collection of the President’s diaries, letters, and papers: “I was supposed to be named Harrison Shippe Truman, taking the middle name from my paternal grandfather. But others in the family wanted my middle name to be Solomon, taken from my maternal grandfather. But apparently no agreement could be reached and my name was recorded and stands simply as Harry S. Truman.”

Presidency. He had many critics who disagreed with him, quarrelled with him and ridiculed him at times. But no-one ever accused him of avoiding a decision. History will remember, too, that he referred to the Alger Hiss case as a “red herring,” that he once seized the steel industry in an action which the Supreme Court ruled illegal, and that he unceremoniously fired General MacArthur during the Korean war.

From public reaction, these three decisions probably were the most unpopular things he did during the seven years and nine months he served as President. But he never publicly wavered in the belief that they were the right actions.

Give ’em hell Mr Truman was a thorough politician also, the devoted head of the Democratic Party while President and its elder spokesman — but occasional caustic observer —- afterward.

He rose from precinct captain in brawling Kansas City, through county office and the United States Senate to the most important public office in the nation. He loved politics and played the game well. So well, in fact, that in an astonishing campaign —“Give ’em hell, Harry” became almost a battle-cry—he pulled off one of the great upsets in United States political history with his election in 1948, defeating his heavily favoured opponent, Mr Thomas Dewey. He was a colourful public figure. He wore gaudy sports shirts on his holidays in Florida. He played the piano. He wore steel-rimmed glasses. He spoke with a

peppery mid-Western twang; and he took long walks in the early morning.

He hurled invective at some of his critics, once referring to a columnist as a “son of a bitch.” He wrote a letter while President threatening a music critic with bodily harm for being unkind to the singing voice of his daughter, Margaret.

The music critic had hit Mr Truman where it hurt most. —in his family. For he was a devoted family man, and he would not tolerate any aspersions on his wife, Bess, whom he called “the boss,” or on his daughter. Truman, a Baptist, was a religious man. He once said that religion had sustained him in many of his more difficult periods. Crucial years In 1945, after Hiroshima, the United States held a monopoly on the atomic bomb, but Truman offered to turn over its secret to the world for control under an international body — only, however, if there were “foolproof” safeguards. ■ Russia rejected the conditions, while working diligently to perfect an atomic weapon of its own. In 1949 it succeeded. But the fall of China to the Communists in 1949 was a development for which Mr Truman was most blamed by his foes.

He had supported a policy of compromise between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese and the Communists.

The charge that Mr Truman lost China became one of the big issues of the 1952 Presidential campaign, which the Democrats lost to a war hero, General Dwight Eisenhower, after 20 years in power.

Although Mr Adlai Stevenson and not Mr Truman was the candidate that year, the Truman Administration took ‘he br>’-' tf the Rr ib-IR'

the brunt of the Republican onslaught. The indecisive war lin Korea — then nearly 2 J i years old — was another major issue.

Humble start Mr Harry S Truman was born on May 8. 1884, in an unpretentious house in Missouri.

Because his parents could not afford to send him to college, he went to work in a drug store, then in other, sundry jobs.

When the United States entered World War I he was commissioned as a first lieu-

tenant. Returning, he held a major’s commission in the re- > serve and later was a reserve colonel. In 1919, he married his childhood sweetheart, Bess Wallace, the daughter of one of the oldest and most prominent families in the area. Friends regarded the Truman marriage as ideal. The couple had one child, Margaret, who was born in 1924. After the war he and a friend pooled their resources and opened a haberdashery store in Kansas City. Theii venture flourished until the first post-war depression. Then it failed. Truman lost $15,000. In 1921, through a friend from the Army, he found a iqb with the Kansas City Democratic “boss,” Mr Tom Pendergast. A year later, Mr Truman won election as a member of the county court. Having made his record there, he entered the senatorial race in 1934 and won, then was re-elected in 1940 j despite bitter attacks that; called him a “stooge” of the ; Pendergast machine.

Against corruption Mr Truman’s greatest fame before he became President arose from his work as chairman of the Senate committee on national defence. The

group kept a close watch on war production, to guard against profiteering and faulty workmanship.

In his final term of office, Mr Truman was forced to defend his Adminstration against charges of corruption in the Internal Revenue Bureau and tax division of the Justice Department.

Presidency, seized the steel mills. Mr Truman took one of his worst judicial defeats in office over the steel issue. Steel management took the Federal seizure to the Supreme Court. The High Court, in an historic decision, reversed the President. The strike began the next day, June 3. and lasted 52 days. Hometown again Although he was critically! ill after an operation in 1954, Mr Truman led an active life in his old home town until another operation, in 1963. when his health started to fail.

He fired the Attorney General. Mr Howard Me

In the relatively quiet years that followed his return to Independence, Mr Truman produced three volumes of, memoirs, saw the creation of! the Truman Library and establishment of library; scholarship for history stu-i dents, and instructed scores; of student audiences in the! meaning and practices, the privileges and responsibilities; of American government. He also took part in a series of network television | shows and wrote a continuing; series of articles for a news-1 paper feature syndicate. Even in the waning years! of his life, Mr Truman never l hesitated to name the most! difficult decision he ever; faced: the sending of Ameri-; can troops to Korea. And he 1 never doubted the wisdom of; his most questioned decision:! the dropping of the atomicj bomb which ended the war; with Japan and inaugurated the nuclear age.

Grath, when Mr McGrath quarrelled with the administration’s “clean-up” campaign.

Mr Truman refused to invoke the Republicansponsored Taft-Hartley labour act, which he abhorred (it was enacted over his veto), to stop a steel strike in 1952 and, acting under what he termed the “inherent powers” of the

“It was a nilitary decision,” he had sai “No other course ’as conceivable.”