"I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell."
—Harry S Truman
He seems, at first glance, an odd candidate to be the object of a cult. The nation is exhausted by its Indochina war. He was in the White House during another bitterly debated Asian conflict. Détente remains the Administration's diplomatic goal. He was a general in the cold war. Politics is perhaps the most discredited profession in the country. He knew no other way of life.
And yet, some 25 years after leaving office and 2½ years after his death, Harry Truman has assumed the dimensions of a folk hero. Truman buttons bring up to $150 at antique stores. The Truman Library in Independence, Mo., is thronged with visitors. Plain Speaking, Merle Miller's account of some salty talk with the 33rd President, has sold 2½ million copies. Margaret Truman Daniel's affectionate memoir will be filmed this fall. James Whitmore's theatrical impersonation, Give 'Em Hell Harry! (TIME, May 12) is playing to S.R.O. audiences all across the country. A singularly ardent fan of the Truman boom is Gerald Ford, who recently assured Mrs. Daniel, "Everyone who knows me knows how I feel about your father."* Such high-level boosterism has given the country a sudden fit of Trumania. In addition to the books, there are Truman T shirts, bumper stickers and even a song by the rock group Chicago: "america's calling ... harry, you'd know what to do."
In part, Trumania can be ascribed to nostalgia, the phenomenon that glamorizes everything in the rear-view mirror. But mostly it is the fallout from Watergate. After the chilling scandals of the Nixon regime, the little ex-haberdasher from Missouri seems fit for Mount Rushmore. Of recent Presidents, only Truman and Dwight Eisenhower (whom H.S.T. resented) were able to retire from office with their reputations largely intact. Yet Truman never wasted a second polishing his image. He actively campaigned for Adlai Stevenson as the man to succeed him as Democratic standard bearer—but grumbled that the Hamlet-like Illinois Governor "was too busy making up his mind whether he had to go to the bathroom or not." Enemies fared far worse, rhetorically. According to Merle Miller, Truman called Nixon "a shifty-eyed goddam liar," and described General Douglas MacArthur as "a man there wasn't anything real about."
A few might say that about H.S.T. himself. Historian Richard Freeland, in The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism, argues that "the practices of McCarthyism were Truman's practices in cruder hands, just as the language of McCarthyism was Truman's language in less well-meaning voices." Charles Mee's recent Meeting at Potsdam portrays a vulpine Truman cynically deciding to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima to frighten the Soviets rather than to vanquish an already prostrate enemy.