Jeffrey Frank, author of the bestselling Ike and Dick, returns with
the "beguiling" (The New York Times) first full account of the Truman
presidency in nearly thirty years, recounting how a seemingly ordinary
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 bomb and the
development of far deadlier weapons; the start of the Cold War and the
creation of the NATO alliance; the Marshall Plan to rebuild the wreckage
of postwar Europe; the Red Scare; and the fateful decision to commit
troops to fight a costly "limited war" 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 fought for
a national health insurance plan. While he was disturbed by the brutal
treatment of African Americans and came to support stronger civil rights
laws, he never 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 instinct and
combativeness, as when he asserted a president's untested power to seize
the nation's steel mills.
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 "intimate" (The
Washington Post) portrait of a man, born in the 19th century, who set
the nation on a course that reverberates in the 21st century, a leader
who never lost a schoolboy's love for his country and its Constitution.
