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David Cordell
The book review below is from the Wall Street Journal. Sorry for the length, but it is very interesting.
A couple of things (among many) struck me.
1) FDR ran for his fourth term even though doctors told him he wouldn't live all the way through that term. I suppose he thought he would make it to the end of the war and be alive to hear his praises sung. Whatever. He only made it a few months. It strikes me as extraordinarily selfish. He selected a new VP for that term (Truman) and kept him at a distance, resulting in Truman's ascendency with little knowledge of what was going on. Totally irresponsible on FDR's part.
2) Truman, who was President when we were born, decided not to run in 1952. He was "only" 68. Roosevelt died at 63.
Both of these thoughts remind me of Biden's insistence on running at his (ridiculously) advanced age for such a critical and stressful job. Trump is too old, too, but at least he isn't senile. As I have said before, Biden and his wife are incredibly selfish to put the nation at risk. This is a guy who has already had two brain surgeries for aneurysms.
If Biden dies in office or his pushed out with the 25th Amendment, guess what we have to look forward to.
By the way, we watched the movie Dave a few days ago. Great movie and ties in to the current situation pretty well. The Ben Kingsley (vice president) reminds me of the situation with FDR and Truman.
The table in this link is pretty interesting. Check out the column for age at end of presidency. Whoever wins this election will have the record as the oldest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States_by_age#:~:text=The%20oldest%20president%20at%20the,Biden%2C%20who%20is%20currently%2081.
‘Ascent to Power’ Review: Harry Truman’s Moment
With little preparation after FDR’s death, Truman found himself leading the nation with World War II still to be won.
By Robert W. Merry
April 19, 2024 12:17 pm ET
In May 1948, as President Harry Truman was gearing up for his campaign to retain the White House, grumblings could be heard within the Democratic Party about his wooden speaking style. J. Howard McGrath, the party chair, asked his publicity director, Jack Redding, what could be done. Simple, replied Redding. Truman and his speechwriters should stop trying to make the president sound like his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. In other words, let Harry be Harry. “Put him on the rear end of a train,” Redding suggested. “If people see him in person . . . his personality, his smile, his manner of approach, his sincerity [will] all come through perfectly.”
So Truman’s handlers sent him on a 15-day, 18-state tour, during which the president gave 73 speeches. Soon he was “on fire,” writes David Roll in “Ascent to Power: How Truman Emerged From Roosevelt’s Shadow and Remade the World.” Truman’s folksy “straight talk” materialized in force.
Mr. Roll, a lawyer and author whose previous books include biographies of George Marshall and Harry Hopkins, offers here a thoroughly researched narrative, rendered in clear, unadorned prose, of a journeyman politician who became president while being “utterly unprepared” for the job. In the end, he survived and thrived. “The decisions were bold,” writes Mr. Roll, “their impacts profound.” In subsequent surveys of academics designed to rate and rank presidential performance, Truman emerges as a “near great.”
Roosevelt, of course, consistently ranks among the three greatest presidents. But greatness eluded the seriously ailing figure in July 1944 when he decided to run for a fourth term despite his doctor’s warning that he wouldn’t survive to the end of it. Once re-elected, with Truman on the ticket, Roosevelt lifted not a finger to prepare his vice president for what he would face when fate inevitably handed him the presidency. Mr. Roll calls that behavior a “dereliction.”
Further, Roosevelt left his successor with an ill-considered policy of trying to placate Joseph Stalin even as the willful Soviet leader demonstrated his intent to dominate Eastern Europe with an iron fist. Not until Truman tossed aside that particular Roosevelt legacy did he manage to shape his own signal achievements in the realm of Cold War realism. “I’m tired of babying the Soviets,” he declared, preferring a more confrontational approach designed to thwart further Soviet expansionism.
Roosevelt and Truman could not have been more different in background, temperament or leadership style. Roosevelt, born to wealth, grew up in a mansion called Springwood. Truman, born to poverty, grew up in an unnamed dwelling of some 600 square feet. Roosevelt graduated from Groton and Harvard and projected himself as a supremely confident blue-blood gentleman. Truman struggled to define himself through years as a Midwestern farmer, World War I combat officer, failed clothier, and finally as an effective county official under Tom Pendergast, the plutocratic boss of Kansas City politics whose career ended with a stretch in federal prison.
Remarkably, Truman’s association with Pendergast never stained the future president’s reputation, which may have been why the backroom boss selected the local pol in 1934 as his candidate for a Missouri seat in the U.S. Senate. Truman was “floored and flabbergasted” by the offer, writes Mr. Roll, and seized the opportunity. He demonstrated his independence as a senator when, some six years later, Roosevelt offered him a cushy federal job if he would forgo a re-election bid so the president could maneuver a favored crony into his seat. Truman’s reply to a Roosevelt emissary: “Tell the president to go to hell.”
With U.S. entry into World War II looming, Truman hit upon the need for a congressional committee to identify and address profiteering and mismanagement in defense contracting. As the committee chairman throughout most of the war, Truman gained acclaim for saving the country some $10 billion to $15 billion in military spending, or some $180 billion to $270 billion today. Time magazine placed him on its cover and described him as “scrupulously honest.”
Throughout Truman’s 82-day tenure as vice president, he dreaded the day when he would be thrust into a role that filled him with anxiety. “It scares hell out of me,” he confided to his friends. When the day came, Truman told a Senate colleague, “I’m not big enough for this job.”
And yet, as Mr. Roll makes clear, just beneath the surface of the Truman persona was a steely resolve, a zest for the challenges of life and an underlying confidence in his own sturdy judgment. He was, writes the author, “a politician to the core” to whom “the lure of the presidency was irresistible.”
Besides, Truman differentiated himself from, as Mr. Roll describes him, the often “subtle and devious” Roosevelt. FDR had a tendency to shroud his thinking with personnel manipulations and secretive maneuvers designed to set his people against one another. Truman was an unflinching and forthright decision maker, always moving forward and never looking back. Winston Churchill described him as “a man of immense determination. He takes no notice of delicate ground, he just plants his foot down firmly upon it.”
Truman’s leadership wasn’t always smooth. His approval ratings often sank to ominous levels. He made mistakes when his intrepid decision-making became hasty and rash. He got the country bogged down in an Asian war that he couldn’t win and couldn’t end. He sometimes seemed to be a smaller figure than the crisis times needed.
But his legacy, when considered in toto, was immense. In foreign policy, he saved Europe with his Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift and creation of NATO. In domestic policy, he successfully transitioned the country from a wartime to a peacetime economy and steered it through troublesome labor strife. He bravely placed civil rights on the national agenda with executive orders integrating the military and thwarting discrimination in federal hiring and promotions and with the creation of a high-profile presidential committee on the subject. The committee’s recommendations, wrote the journalist Robert Donovan, “catapulted the civil rights question to the forefront as never before.”
Along the way, the American people rewarded Truman with his entirely unexpected 1948 presidential victory. He served nearly eight years before deciding not to run in the 1952 election. His White House tenure demonstrates that presidential leadership hinges primarily on decision-making, and it doesn’t matter whether the decision maker is from the Hudson River gentry or more rustic areas further west. What matters is the outcome. As Truman expressed it in a letter to his sister, “nearly every crisis seems to be the worst one but after it’s over it isn’t so bad.”
Mr. Merry is the author of six books on American history and foreign policy, including “Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861,” out this summer.
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