Word: truman
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PLAIN SPEAKING is an entertaining experiment in oral biography that works fairly well because Harry Truman had a folksy and unpretentious way of expressing himself. The book consists of interviews conducted in the early 1960s with Truman, his family, and many of his friends and colleagues as well as commentary by Merle Miller...
...Harry Truman's ascension to the Presidency was the result of a series of coincidences. He headed a routine Senate investigation concerning national defense preparedness and munitions industries that uncovered major scandals which catapulted him into national prominence. Thus when President Roosevelt found it necessary to dump Henry Wallace from the Democratic ticket in 1944, Truman emerged as a compromise choice for Vice-President. Three months after he took office, F.D.R.'s death placed Truman in the White House. Yet in spite of this accidental assumption of the office, many historians, such as Clinton Rossiter and Arthur M. Schlesinger...
Miller, who conducted and edited the interviews, traces Truman's career, exploring with Truman and others the beginning of U.S. involvement in Korea, the Marshall Plan, the firing of General MacArthur, and the 1948 election campaign. Miller emphasizes Truman as an individual, his relationships with other important personalities, and his feelings about important decisions he had to make. It is this material which makes the book interesting. There is no new historical insight, nor is there any surprising or previously unpublished information of any significance. But just to have Truman say of Douglas MacArthur, "there are times when...
Unfortunately Plain Speaking is little more than such an exposure to Harry Truman's views on the major personalities and events of his time. Miller makes no real attempt to go beyond the anecdotes--interesting as they are--to work at some sort of psycho-historical interpretation. His admiration of Truman is so intense it approaches hero-worship. The result is that Miller's questions are largely set-ups, which fail to press Truman in the least, and merely afford the ex-President an opportunity to display his nobility of purpose and character...
...would seem that a book like this, made up of intimate interviews with a key figure, would provide a unique opportunity to explore crucial historical events: for example, in Truman's case, the decision to drop the bomb. Although Miller raises this subject, he does it ever so gently, in spite of the fact that he himself has written a book deploring the Hiroshima and Nagasaki massacres. He tells of proposing that Truman make a goodwill trip to Hiroshima seventeen years after the war. Truman's response was, "I'll go to Japan, if that's what you want...