If you were to ascribe Harry Truman’s path to the presidency to a fictional character, people would call it unrealistic.
The son of a failed speculator in and harvester of grain, Truman, too, failed at nearly every endeavor in his adult life — oilman, farmer, haberdasher — until his experience as a World War I captain led the corrupt boss of Kansas City’s Democratic machine to slate him for a county commissioner post.
Luck, pluck and industriousness made breaks for him, and, come 1944, when the Democratic Party was casting about for a vice presidential candidate to serve under the weakening Franklin D. Roosevelt, the two-term senator got the nod, almost by accident, as “the Missouri compromise” between liberal and conservative forces in the party.
If you were to take this biography a step further, and present this character with the responsibility for deciding whether and how to use the most awesome weapon humanity had yet devised, those attending the story might well shut the book, or leave the theater, in disbelief.
But Truman’s reality, his seemingly genuine homespunness that saw him writing in his own diary such unaffected colloquialisms as whether Josef Stalin was playing “according to Hoyle,” was undeniable, however far-fetched the plot line.
It is the challenge of the Truman biographer to penetrate the crust of myth, the one-man plays, the popular songs, the immortalized aphorisms, all enshrining the notion of Plain-spoken Harry. “Truman,” the new, 4 1/2-hour television biography that is only the latest light in “The American Experience’s” ongoing series of presidential lives, does so with the kind of directness commonly ascribed to the president who ended World War II and began the Cold War.
Over its considerable length (8 p.m. Sunday and Monday, WTTW-Ch. 11), “Truman” does not debunk the popular notion of the Independence, Mo., native as a cutter of cant. But it also presents a more complicated man, one who was capable of moments of philosophical lucidity as well as willful obfuscation.
Touring the devastation of Berlin before meeting with Stalin and Winston Churchill after the European portion of World War II had ended, Truman wrote, “What a pity the human animal is not able to put his moral thinking into practice. I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries.”
Though unprepared for the presidency when he assumed it upon Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Truman knew by the time of his Berlin tour, of course, of the awesome weapon being developed at Los Alamos in New Mexico. And he agreed with the unanimous opinion of his advisers that it should be put to use to stop further American bloodshed in wringing surrender out of a seemingly intractable Japanese Army.
But still — and here is the attempt to pull wool over his own eyes, or at least to shield his reputation against the judgment of history — Truman recorded in his diary that he had instructed his secretary of war to use the atomic bomb against only military targets. He had to know, the film points out, that its destructive magnitude made this wishful thinking.
The documentary by David Grubin (he made “American Experience’s” great Theodore Roosevelt biography of last October) takes as its jumping-off point the unlikelihood of President Harry Truman and the incredible decision he had to make. But then, as with the Roosevelt bio, it takes the life pretty much in chronological order.
The 150 minutes of Part 1 journey from Truman’s boyhood in the rough-and-tumble frontier town of Independence, as a self-described “sissy” who wore spectacles and devoted himself to the piano, through his transformative experience in World War I, when he led and won the respect of a rogue brigade without losing a man, up to the White House and the decision to use the bomb.
Part 2 follows the much more muddied denouement of his presidency, when Americans who had initially responded to his seeming averageness, especially in contrast to the patrician FDR, began to sour on it. Truman, with a rock-bottom approval rating, chose not to seek re-election in 1952.
What is startling to the uninitiated in Truman lore are the contrasts. He never renounced the spectacularly corrupt machine pol who made him, yet he made his name in Washington as the senator who singlehandedly served as watchdog over corruption in American war preparations efforts.
His insecurity at times seemed profound. The series of quotations from the letters he wrote during his epic courtship of eventual wife Bess reveal an almost comic diffidence. “You would do better perhaps if you pitched me into the ash heap and picked someone with more sense and ability and not such a soft head,” he wrote her after one of his early failures.
Yet he had the necessary resolve too. “In that makeup is iron, real iron,” says David McCullough, host of “The American Experience,” author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning Truman biography and one of the historians the film relies on in coming to a similarly admiring judgment.
How, after all, can you not admire a man who had the nerve to tell reporters, upon learning of Roosevelt’s death, that “I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me”?
