WHILE visiting Harry Truman in the closing months of his presidency, Winston Churchill spoke with blunt generosity: "The last time you and I sat across a conference table was at Potsdam. I must confess, sir, I held you in very low regard. I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt. I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization."
If Churchill was deceived at first, so were most of his contemporaries. Sir Winston, in fact, was some years ahead of other historians in his reevaluation. Truman was one of those public men whose reputations flourish only after years of retirement. His nondescript appearance, his shoot-from-the-hip partisanship, his taste for mediocre cronies who tainted the record with scandal —all the things that made him seem too small for the office—dwindled in importance with the passing decades. What loomed larger was a sense of the man's courage, a realization that he faced and made more great decisions than most other American Presidents. It was Harry Truman who decided to drop the atomic bomb. It was the Truman Doctrine that shattered the long U.S. tradition of peacetime isolation by supporting Greece and Turkey against Communist threats. It was Truman's Marshall Plan that committed U.S. resources to the rebuilding of Europe. Later Truman defied the Soviet blockade of Berlin and risked war by authorizing the airlift. Still later he met the Communist invasion of South Korea by ordering U.S. forces into the field.
If those accomplishments were long past, the Trumanesque spunk and will that produced them were evident right up to the end. After a tenacious 22-day struggle in Kansas City's Research Hospital and Medical Center (see MEDICINE), the nation's 33rd President died, at 88, from what doctors officially termed "organic failures causing a collapse of the cardiovascular system." Truman had detested Richard Nixon for years after the 1952 campaign, when Nixon implied that Truman might be treasonously soft on Communism, but the feud was since mended. Now Nixon proclaimed a 30-day period of national mourning and praised Truman as "one of the most courageous Presidents in our history" and "a man with guts." Warm tributes from world leaders flowed into Independence, Mo. France's President Georges Pompidou and Great Britain's Queen Elizabeth II both cited Truman's aid in rebuilding Europe after the war. Noting Truman's early recognition and support of Israel, Foreign Minister Abba Eban said the U.S. President had "helped a tormented humanity to stand on its feet and to raise its head high once again."