A kind Providence blessed America. From our soil sprung leaders about whom the last word will never be written—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts and Eisenhower. As we look back on 250 years add one more to our Pantheon.
This titan had no heroic gifts. He led no armies. He had no marketable charisma. He was no sage. He never spoke for the “ages.” He had a plain manner and small-town twang. He was a railroad timekeeper and haberdasher not a college graduate. He emerged from a corrupt big city machine. When he reached the presidency he was derisively referred to as “His Accidency.” His Coke bottle thick glasses and his flowery tropical shirts made him, in the words of David McCullogh, seem “ordinary.” But there was nothing ordinary about Harry Truman. And in an age when politicians were circling the wagons around polling and scientific analysis, he told the people:
“Here I am, here’s what I stand for and here’s what I’m going to do for you if you keep me in the job. You decide.” Harry S. Truman
He pulled off the greatest electoral upset in American history when no one, but Harry Truman thought he would win.
With the world on fire, this man who leaned on the cadence of the King James Bible, faith in the Constitution and the exceptionalism of the American epoch, stepped into the breach. On March 12, 1947, with communist forces threatening to engulf Greece and Turkey and Great Britain no longer capable of providing aid, Harry Truman stood before Congress and declared that that the mantle of freedom was now ours to defend. His immediate appeal was to provide military and economic assistance for Greece and Turkey. But more broadly, he articulated that free peoples worldwide were now looking to the United States for leadership and support—and we would answer that call. The Truman Doctrine made clear we would stand shoulder to shoulder with the free world against the forces of communism. And stand we did.
The Truman Doctrine alone would have earned him a prominent place in our history, but his list of accomplishments extended even further to the Marshall Plan, the recognition of Israel (where he opposed the man he admired most in America—General George C. Marshall), and the Berlin Airlift. He created the Defense Department and the CIA. He integrated the armed forces and sent the first civil rights message to the Congress knowing it would rip his party asunder. He dismissed Douglas MacArthur and reestablished the primacy of civilian control of the military. Millions who don’t know his name live in freedom because of his courage. We are in Harry Truman’s world and today’s battlefields are exactly the places he warned us to maintain vigilance—Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Korea, Japan and China.
No president apart from Lincoln made more history altering decisions than Harry Truman. As we celebrate another birthday while the world again boils over, Shakespeare reminds us that we would be wise to have “A little touch of Harry in the night.”
