Fifties Read Online Free PDF Page B

the semiofficial voice of the Republican party, called them. To some extent that charge was true, although Truman was old-fashioned enough not to permit off-color jokes. He liked to call the White House “the great white jail.” Even that came to be viewed with tolerance and a certain amount of amusement; after he spent every day grappling with the difficult issues of government, who could begrudge him the pleasure of seeking out old friends in order to relax? To the degree that he could, he continued as he had before, above all to be true to himself in all friendships.
    He neither flattered nor responded to flattery. On the rare occasions he showed his anger, it was not over issues of state but rather because he had personally taken offense. Once he wrote a letter threatening to kick a music critic in the genitalia because the critic had panned a concert by his daughter. Even here he was sure that ordinary people would be on his side. “Now, you wait and see,” he told his angry wife and daughter after they found out about the letter. “Every man in the United States that’s got a daughter will be on my side.” And they were, he added later in an interview with Merle Miller. He did not like people who put on airs—“stuffed shirts” and “fuddy-duddys,” as he called them. He used simple words in his speeches, never “two-dollar words” or “weasel words.” His experiences in the military as an artillery officer made him wary of many generals; he liked his generals modest and thought of such men as MacArthur and Patton as big-brass fancy hats. Much to the annoyance of Dean Acheson, he referred to the State Department people as “striped-pants boys.”
    He had virtually no personal income, and he and his family always lived modestly. He knew the value of a dollar and would complain loudly if he thought he had been overcharged, as on the occasion of a breakfast at the famed Peabody Hotel in November 1941: “Had breakfast in the coffee shop downstairs and they charged me fifty-five centers for tomato juice, a little dab of oatmeal and milk and toast. I don’t mind losing one hundred dollars on a hoss race or a poker game with friends, but I do hate to pay fifty-five centers for a quarter breakfast ...” The straightforward simplicity of his style would come to seem marvelously human compared to that of the subsequent inhabitants of the White House, ever more image-conscious and isolated from the public by a growing number of handlers, public relations men, and pollsters.
    He was the last American President who had not been to collegeand yet he was quite possibly the best-read President of modern times. His unusually bad eyesight (he was as “blind as a mole,” in his own words) had precluded his participation in sports, so as a boy, he had read prodigiously. His broad knowledge of history often surprised his White House aides, a good number of whom had been to elite boarding schools and colleges and were at first inclined to think of themselves as better educated than he.
    He was a late bloomer. His early life had been filled with failure, and it was only as a National Guard captain in World War One that he distinguished himself. His entry into the political arena came late in life—he won his first race for a local office at age thirty-eight, and with the help of the Pendergast machine, he narrowly won a Senate seat when he was fifty. As he wrote Bess in 1942, upon the occasion of their twenty-third wedding anniversary, “Thanks to the right life partner for me we’ve come out pretty well. A failure as a farmer, miner, an oil promoter, and a merchant, but finally hit the groove as a public servant—and that due mostly to you and Lady Luck.”
    Within the world of Kansas City politics he had a sterling record for honesty. “Three things ruin a man,” he liked to say: “power, money, and women. I never wanted power, I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now.”