Word: truman
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When Mao took power in 1949, America's initial reaction was a hands-off policy. In January 1950, Truman made his now famous promise not to "pursue a course which will lead to involvement in the civil conflict in China." Yet when the Korean war broke out, Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Straits and established the pattern of massive American military aid to Chiang Kai-shek's regime...
...wealthy Washingtonian who was the first U.S. Ambassador to Ireland; of a heart attack; in Washington, D.C. A partner in the firm of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith from 1940 to his retirement in 1959, Garrett was also a prominent capital host and fund raiser for philanthropic causes. Harry Truman selected him to head the U.S. legation in Dublin in 1947, then promoted him in 1950 when the mission was raised to embassy status. Garrett resigned in 1951, later championed urban redevelopment in Washington as boss of the Federal City Council...
...There's no question now ? we've got to go in." Recalling that decision, he said later: "On a much smaller scale, I think I have some feeling now of how Truman must have felt when he decided to drop the A-bomb...
...President's hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.") Behind this stretches a five-part mural in etched magnesium. In reality, each panel is a blown-up photoengraver's plate of a news photograph-Lyndon with Roosevelt, with Truman, with Eisenhower, with Kennedy. Then at last, Lyndon alone. Above this hubristic album, the stuff of history begins-floodlit document boxes, bound in red morocco with a gold presidential seal emblazoned on each one, stretching tier on tier to the roof...
Technically, the building is just one more presidential library, maintained by the National Archives and Records Service like its far more modest counterparts, the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., the Truman Library in Independence, Mo., the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kans. Actually it is a reductio ad absurdum of the presidential library system. No doubt historians will in time sift its unwieldy contents and make some pattern of them. Meanwhile, the building itself exists to tell history what to think. This is one of the traditional functions of monuments, but rarely has it been so heavily exploited...