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In tone if not in specifics, these adverse judgments reflect the view of Truman's contemporary enemies, who considered him a clay idol with human feet. The now beloved Missouri Democrat had the dubious distinction of scoring the lowest Gallup popular-approval rating (23%) ever accorded a President—lower even than Nixon's 24%. In fact, Harry Truman's entire career was riddled with paradox and contradiction. Although he was so scrupulous that even in the White House he used his own stamps on personal letters, Truman was the product of Boss Pendergast's corrupt Kansas City machine. His senatorial career, distinguished by wartime investigations of defense production, was nearly ended by Franklin D. Roosevelt's lack of confidence. F.D.R., who thought the Missouri Senator could not be reelected, tried to persuade Truman to retire. He refused, won another term and soon found himself, much to his own surprise, Roosevelt's running mate in 1944. As President, he announced himself as a friend of the laboring man; yet he once threatened to seize the railroads and install the Army to run them when faced with a nationwide strike.
Truman was a common man who became the nation's Chief Executive—like Ford, by accident—at an uncommon time. The early postwar years marked the apex of America's political influence and prestige. Communism was a cold war threat, but the Soviet Union lagged far, far behind America as a military power. In short, no U.S. President before Truman or after him had such capacity to shape the course of history.
Nothing in his background as a journeyman Middle Western politician prepared him for the kind of decisions he had to make in the White House. Yet he made those choices, without swagger or rhetoric. (It is typical that he called his Administration the Fair Deal. Not Great. Not Big. Just Fair.) Without that extraordinary scheme for giving, the Marshall Plan, Western Europe might never have survived as a community of free, capitalist democracies. A case could be made that the civil rights movement began with Truman's tough, ten-point message to Congress in 1948, which created the Federal Fair Employment Practices Committee. It also created the Dixiecrat movement, which cost him the 39 electoral votes of four Southern states in that year's election.
It is a bromide of American politics that Presidents "grow" in office. But some have actually shrunk in the job, and most have remained depressingly the same in character and ability. Truman was one of the few who demonstrated a capacity to change with the demands of his epoch. It is that capacity that underlies the wistful longings of Trumania.